The Lure of Anti-Semitism
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd i 7/30/2007 9:27:52 PM Jewish Identities in a Changing World
General Editors Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yosef Gorny
VOLUME 10
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd ii 8/3/2007 4:59:49 PM The Lure of Anti-Semitism
Hatred of Jews in Present-Day France
By Michel Wieviorka
with Philippe Bataille, Clarisse Buono, Sébastien Delsalle, Damien Guillaume, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Emmanuel Kreis, Jocelyne Ohana, Alexandra Poli, Svetlana Tabatchnikova, Simonetta Tabboni, Nikola Tietze, Fiammetta Venner
Translated by Kristin Couper Lobel and Anna Declerck
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd iii 7/30/2007 9:27:53 PM This book was rst published as, La tentation antisémite : haine des Juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui. Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 2005. The author would like to acknowledge the aid of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah in the translation of this book.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on http://catalog.loc.gov.
ISBN 1570-7997 ISBN 978 90 04 16337 9
Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd iv 8/3/2007 4:59:49 PM For Roman, a true Gosu
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd v 7/30/2007 9:27:53 PM WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd vi 7/30/2007 9:27:53 PM CONTENTS
Abbreviations ...... xi Translators’ Note ...... xv Works by Michel Wieviorka ...... xix General Introduction ...... xxi
PART ONE BACKGROUND
Introduction ...... 3 1. What Do the Statistics Tell Us? ...... 5 2. In Schools ...... 16 3. Changes in the Public Sphere ...... 23 4. The Shoah: De cit, Plethora and Loss of Meaning ...... 48 5. Global Anti-Semitism ...... 62 6. The Jews in France: Developments and Concerns ...... 80 Conclusion ...... 88
PART TWO GHETTO ANTI-SEMITISM
Introduction ...... 93 7. Anti-Semitism (almost) without Jews ...... 98 8. The Power of the Imagination ...... 115 9. A Sociological Intervention ...... 124 10. Muslim Anti-Semitism: The View from Prison ...... 141 Conclusion ...... 156
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd vii 8/3/2007 4:59:49 PM viii contents
PART THREE ANTI-SEMITISM AND COMMUNITIES
Introduction ...... 161 11. The Jews, the ChaldoAssyrians and the Others ...... 163 12. Anti-Semitism at Local Level ...... 177 13. An Unusual Variant of ‘Global’ Anti-Semitism ...... 200 14. “Why There Were No Clashes in Sarcelles” ...... 214 15. The Marseilles Counterpoint: The Pieds-noirs and the Jews ...... 228
PART FOUR IN ALSACE
Introduction ...... 241 16. The Fears of the Jews in Alsace ...... 244 17. Malaise in the Alsatian Countryside ...... 255 18. Two Extreme Right Political Forces, Two Anti-Semitic Rationales ...... 270 19. Mohammed Latrèche and the Parti des musulmans de France ...... 283 20. Desecrations ...... 294 Conclusion ...... 306
PART FIVE IN THE UNIVERSITIES
Introduction ...... 311 21. Boycotting Israel ...... 314 22. Two Extreme Cases of Anti-Zionism ...... 320 23. Leftism in Decline and Extreme Anti-Zionism ...... 333 Conclusion ...... 351
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd viii 8/2/2007 2:37:06 PM contents ix
PART SIX ANTI-SEMITISM: A QUESTION IN SCHOOLS?
Introduction ...... 359 24. The Clamour of the Media and the Silence of the Teachers ...... 361 25. Dealing with the Shoah in Schools ...... 376 26. Ethnic Diversity in Schools ...... 390 27. Abuse and Attacks ...... 398 28. Anti-Semitism in Schools and Globalisation ...... 410
General Conclusion ...... 418
Index ...... 427
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd ix 8/2/2007 2:37:06 PM WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd x 7/30/2007 9:27:53 PM ABBREVIATIONS
AA Alsace d’abord Alsace First AACF Association des Assyro-Chaldéens de France The Association of ChaldoAssyrians of France AGEN Association générale des étudiants de Nanterre The General Association of Students of Nanterre AGET Association générale des Etudiants de Toulouse The General Association of Students of Toulouse AIPAC American Israel Public Affairs Committee APHG Association des professeurs d’histoire-géographie Association of lecturers in history and geography AUJF Appel uni é des Juifs de France United Jewish Appeal, France BAC Brigade anticriminalité Anti-crime squad CADIS Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologiques Centre for Sociological Analysis and Intervention CAPJPO Coordination des appels pour une paix juste au Proche- Orient Joint Appeal for Peace and Justice in the Middle East CFCM Conseil français du culte musulman The French Council of Muslim Faith CGT Confédération générale du travail General Confederation of Labour CICUP Comité interuniversitaire pour la coopération avec les universités palestiniennes Inter-university Committee for cooperation with the Pales- tinian universities CNCDH Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme National Human Rights Consultative Commission CNIL Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés French Data Protection Authority CNT Confédération nationale du travail National Labour Union
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xi 7/30/2007 9:27:53 PM xii abbreviations
CRCM Conseil régional du culte musulman Regional Council of the Muslim Faith CRIF Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France Representative Council of Jewish Institutions CROUS Centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires Regional Centre for Welfare in Universities and Schools CSJUP Comité de solidarité Jussieu avec les universités palesti- niennes Jussieu Palestinian Universities Solidarity Committee EMF Étudiants musulmans de France Muslim students of France FANE Fédération d’action nationale et européenne Federation for National and European Action FN Front national National Front FNJ Organisation des jeunesses du Front national National Front Youth Organisation FNDIRP Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes National Federation of resistants and patriots deported and interned FPLP Front populaire de libération de la Palestine Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine FSE Forum social européen European Social Forum FSJU Fonds social juif uni é United Jewish Social Fund GRECE Groupement de recherche et études pour la civilisation européenne Research and study grouping for European civilisation IRIS Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques Institute of International and Strategic Studies LCR Ligue communiste révolutionnaire Revolutionary Communist League LDH Ligue des droits de l’homme Human Rights League LICA Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme International League against Anti-Semitism
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM abbreviations xiii
LICRA Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’anti- sémitisme International Organisation against Racism and Anti- Semitism LO Lutte ouvrière Workers’ struggle MIB Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues Movement for Immigration and Suburbs MNR Mouvement national républicain National Republican Movement MRAP Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples Anti-Racism Movement PC Parti communiste Communist Party PMF Parti des musulmans de France Party of Muslims of France PS Parti socialiste Socialist Party PT Parti des travailleurs Workers’ Party RPR Rassemblement pour la République Rally for the Republic SGEN-CFDT Syndicat général de l’Éducation nationale-Confédéra- tion française démocratique du travail General National Education Union—French Demo- cratic Labour Union SNCS-FSU Syndicat national des chercheurs scienti ques—Fédé- ration syndicale unitaire National Union of Scienti c Researchers—Unitary trade union federation SNESSup-FSU Syndicat national de l’enseignement supérieur— Fédération syndicale unitaire National Union of Higher Education—Unitary trade union federation UEJF Union des étudiants juifs de France Union of Jewish Students of France UGET Union générale des étudiants tunisiens General Union of Tunisian students
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xiii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM xiv abbreviations
UMP Union pour un mouvement populaire Union for a Popular Movement UNEF Union nationale des étudiants de France French National Student Union UNI Union nationale interuniversitaire Inter-university national union UOIF Union des organisations islamiques de France Union of Islamic Organisations of France VB Vlaams Blok
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xiv 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
Israelite
In Chapter 2 (French page 34) the author explains that this word is now out of use: we no longer use the old vocabulary which referred to them (the Jews) as ‘Israelites’, often as a precaution Where appropriate, a footnote indicates when the term has been used by informants.
Feuj
In Chapter 2, (French page 34) the author explains the use of this word: ‘Feuj’—a slang term used in the suburbs of Paris—which, in some cases, is only an objective expression for a relation experienced in ethnic terms but which, in others, enables the speaker to insult, humiliate and abuse a person very directly. The Jew or the Feuj is then the personi cation of evil, the word, as Brenner notes, “amounts to an insult and is self- suf cient”1—
Fete BBR (Chapter 3)
BBR refers to the colours of the French ag, ‘bleu, blanc, rouge’; the ‘fête BBR’ is an annual political festival traditionally held by the Front national. After an interruption of four years, this festival was held again over 2 days in Le Bourget in October 2005 and over three days in November 2006 (cf. Le Monde, 11 October 2005 and 12/13, 14 & 15 November 2006)
1 Emmanuel Brenner (editor), Les Territoires perdus de la République. Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002, p. 28.
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xv 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM xvi translators’ note
‘BBR’ is also used as a way of describing a French person who is white without being openly racist—see Chapter 9 for an example of this usage.
Pied Noir (Introduction, French p. 14 and Chapter 17)
Pied-noir (with the plural: pieds-noirs) is a term for the former popula- tion of European descent of North Africa, especially Algeria.
Harki
Harki (from the Arabic Haraka: ‘movement’) was the generic term for Muslim Algerians serving as auxiliaries with the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. Since Algerian independence ‘Harki’ has been used as a derogatory expression within Algeria, equating to ‘collaborator’.
Banlieue
Banlieue means suburbs; we have preferred to keep this term in French to avoid the positive connotation associated with ‘suburbs’ in the Anglo- Saxon literature. In everyday speech ‘banlieue’ is associated with the poorer suburbs characterised by the ‘cités’ or low-cost housing projects, poverty, deprivation and unemployment, but there are rich, middle-class ‘banlieues’—for example, Neuilly.
Slang
Commonly used in this text: Bougnoule—dark-skinned foreigner—pejorative Nique ta mere—Mother F***** Ta mere—abbreviated form of the above
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xvi 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM translators’ note xvii
Verlan
In the French language verlan is the inversion of syllables in a word which is found in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of permuting syllables of words to create slang words. The name verlan is itself an example: verlan = lan ver = l’envers (meaning the inverse). Some verlan words have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse. Examples of verlan in the text include: Beur—Arabe Rebeu—beur Feuj—juif Renoi—noir—black person Babtou—toubab—white person
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xvii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xviii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM WORKS BY MICHEL WIEVIORKA
L’Etat, le patronat et les consommateurs, PUF, 1977. Critique de la théorie du capitalisme monopoliste d’Etat (with B. Théret), Mas- pero, 1978. Lutte étudiante (with A. Touraine, F. Dubet, Z. Hegedus), Seuil, 1978. Justice et consommation, La Documentation française, 1978. La prophétie antinucléaire (with A. Touraine, Z. Hegedus, F. Dubet), Seuil, 1980. Le pays contre l’Etat (with A. Touraine, F. Dubet, Z. Hegedus), Seuil, 1981. Solidarité (with Alain Touraine, François Dubet, Jan Strzelecki), Paris, Fayard, 1982 (English translation, Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980–81, Cambridge University Press, 1984). Le mouvement ouvrier (with A. Touraine, F. Dubet), Fayard, 1984 (English translation, The Working-Class Movement, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarnosc, Denoël, 1984. Terrorisme à la Une. Médias, démocratie et terrorisme (with D. Wolton), Gal- limard, coll. « Au vif du sujet », 1987. Sociétés et terrorisme, Fayard, 1988 (English translation, The Making of Ter- rorism, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, new ed. 2003). Le modèle EDF. Essai de sociologie des organisations (with S. Trinh), La Découverte, 1989. L’espace du racisme, Seuil, 1991 (English translation, The Arena of Racism, Sage, 1995). La France raciste (with P. Bataille, D. Jacquin, D. Martuccelli, A. Peralva, P. Zawadzki), Seuil, 1992. Racisme et modernité (edited by M. Wieviorka), La Découverte, 1993. La démocratie à l’épreuve. Nationalisme, populisme, ethnicité, La Découverte, 1993. Racisme et xénophobie en Europe (with P. Bataille, K. Couper, D. Martuc- celli, A. Peralva), La Découverte, 1994. Face au terrorisme, Liana Levi, 1995. Penser le sujet. Autour d’Alain Touraine (edited by F. Dubet and M. Wieviorka), Actes du colloque de Cerisy, Fayard, 1995.
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xix 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM xx works by michel wieviorka
Les Russes d’en bas (with A. Berelowitch), Seuil, 1995. Une société fragmentée (edited by M. Wieviorka), La Découverte, 1996. Commenter la France, Ed. de l’Aube, 1997. Raison et conviction, l’engagement (edited by M. Wieviorka, with S. Moscovici, N. Notat, P. Pachet, M. Perrot), Textuel, 1998. Le racisme, une introduction, La Découverte, 1998. Violence en France (with P. Bataille, K. Clément, O. Cousin, F. Khosro- Khavar, S. Labat, E. Macé, P. Rebughini, N. Tietze), Seuil, 1999. La différence, Balland, 2001. La différence culturelle. Une reformulation des débats (edited by M. Wieviorka, with J. Ohana), Balland, 2001. L’avenir de l’islam en France et en Europe (edited by M.Wieviorka), Actes des Entretiens d’Auxerre, Balland, 2003. Un autre monde . . . Contestations, dérives et surprises dans l’antimondialisation (edited by M. Wieviorka), Balland, 2003. La violence, Balland, 2004. L’empire américain ? (edited by), Actes des Entretiens d’Auxerre, Paris, Balland, 2004. (edited with Jean Baubérot) De la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat à l’avenir de la laïcité, Actes des Entretiens d’Auxerre 2004, Editions de l’Aube/ Essai, 2005. (editor) La tentation antisémite. Haine des Juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2005; Hachette Littératures « Actuel », 2006, 710 p. Michel Wieviorka, Julien Ténédos, Sociologue sous tension. Entretien avec Michel Wieviorka (Parts One and Two), Aux lieux d’être, 2006. Em que mundo viveremos ?, São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 2006. Le printemps du politique (with E. Barnavi, J. Boxser Liwerant, J. Caraça, I. Cisneros, P. Pasquino, E. Sanbar, A. Savas Akat, S. Tabboni, A. Touraine, S. Zermeño, G. Zincone), Robert Laffont, coll. « Le monde comme il va », 2007. (Editor.) Les sciences sociales en mutation (with the collaboration of A. Debarle and J. Ohana), Editions Sciences Humaines, 2007.
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xx 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Will the 21st century see the return of anti-Semitism to France? In recent years, anxiety has been mounting amongst Jews in France, but also, somewhat late in the day, amongst those of a democratic and humanist turn of mind which is by far the most widespread frame of mind in this country, in the media and within political circles. Abroad, in the United States and in Israel, fears repeatedly take the form of accusations describing France as a profoundly anti-Semitic country in which the Jews are said to be in great danger. These fears are based on two analytically distinct elements, even if these do interconnect at a political level: one is the general climate of opinion and the other is actions of a relatively serious nature. There is an increase in areas acting, or apparently acting, as breeding grounds for the verbal abuse, or limited forms of violence which are the expression of present-day anti-Semitism: these are frequently said to be working-class suburbs, schools, some universities, sometimes even the press and television and circles which have not been associated with anti-Semitism to date. The nationalist extreme right or fundamentalist Catholicism, for example, are not the focus of the fears which are most frequently expressed—which obviously does not mean to say that hatred of the Jews has disappeared from these traditional spheres. This overall climate of anti-Semitism includes remarks, graf ti, and threats and, above all, it indicates an end to the taboo on anti-Semitic speech. We are obviously no longer in the post-war environment when Jean-Paul Sartre could write that anti-Semitism, which was merely an opinion until the discovery of Nazi barbarism, should henceforth be considered a criminal offence. Nor are we in that of the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s when recognition of the Shoah, of which till then there was little aware- ness at international level, constituted a symbolic, almost sacred form of protection in the face of any threat of a drift into anti-Semitism. This included acts which, if it were not for the symbolic signi cance associated with any threat to the Jews, would be considered minor, because they fall within the sphere of incivilities or physical attacks of no importance, skirmishes which are quickly stopped, blows which are not serious, spitting, etc.
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xxi 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM xxii general introduction
On the other hand, the sense of danger and of threat is sustained by actual actions which are far more serious, including outright attacks on people, their property or on Jewish institutions: attempted arson of syna- gogues, attacks targeting Jewish schools or desecrations of cemeteries, for example. These actions, which are systematically recorded, appear in the of cial statistics and data or in the data compiled by Jewish com- munity organisations, like the CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France), possibly in close liaison with the authorities. On occasions, anti-Semitism may not be irrefutably established or proved. It may also be exaggerated even before the facts, which are over-interpreted, are recorded. Or else, it may be a myth or a fantasy which, in return, may lead to the accusation that the assertion of the existence of a rise in anti-Semitism today is an exaggeration. This was revealed in a recent incident. In July 2004, a young woman, Marie L., stated that she had been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack in an RER train. This was headline news in the media, before it was discovered to be a hoax. This led the media to re ect on their own way of working as well as on the extent of anti-Semitism. Exaggeration and pure fabrication should obviously not invalidate the undeniable reality of many of the acts of which the anti-Semitic intention is clearly established. These two levels—that of the climate of opinion and that of serious actions—should in no way be confused. An observer endeavouring to understand the problem as a whole solely in the light of what is known about anti-Semitic attacks or aggressions would not be able to give an account of the general climate. He would be faced with the practices of rootless young people, left to their own devices, with no particular ideology, who are not so much imbued with a constructed form of hatred as neglected or relegated. He would be faced too with attitudes predominated by personal differences and the settling of scores, and not necessarily by a deep-seated hatred of Jews. The move to action is not the direct result of the general climate of opinion even if this climate does encourage, permit or facilitate it. The two levels taken together in no way portray a coherent, integrated movement likely to lead to a consistent, political ideology and mobilisation: the movement is fragmented and dislocated. The present climate of opinion and the serious actions do confront us with a nagging question: are we capable of evaluating present-day anti-Semitism correctly? There is always a risk of over or underesti- mation. We waver between the temptation to play down or, on the contrary, to exaggerate the misguided actions of our society. What is
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xxii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM general introduction xxiii
valid for this question in its totality is also valid for each of the ele- ments which shape it from one day to the next. Each event and each piece of information is a challenge to whoever intends to avoid both thinking and saying too much or not enough about it. Many remarks are open to contradictory interpretations, beginning with those relat- ing to Israel. Many judgements are too summary or too rapid: who is anti-Semitic and who is not? It is not always easy to draw a clear line between the two. Expressing oneself on this subject involves running the risk at each instant and at each word, of lapsing into the ideology of pre-determined interpretations. The authors of this book are aware of this dif culty. They took it into consideration from the very beginning of their research which lasted over two years. This book may appear too subtle in the eyes of readers in a hurry to avail themselves of cut-and-dried, de nitive or decisive judgements. But the reality demanded a slow approach. In order to gain a clear understanding of the situation we needed to take the time to carry out an in-depth survey. This tendency to over and underestimate simultaneously is only one feature of a tension speci c to the modern world in general, and which is especially relevant to a theme as sensitive as anti-Semitism: a tendency which simultaneously unites and opposes objectivity and subjectivity. For, where hatred of Jews is concerned, there is always likely to be a considerable distance between what is said and done on the one hand, and what is perceived on the other, especially when the perception is ltered by the media and the images which it puts forward. The lack of links between serious acts of anti-Semitism and the climate of opinion relatively speaking can only reinforce the risk of creating a distance between objectivity—provided that this can be established with the support of reliable statistical data for example—and subjectivity, which varies between individuals and groups, but also over time, from one moment to another. Is a ten year old pupil who draws a swastika on his exercise book making a minor gesture or is he set- ting in motion a vast set of meanings which could attach an immense symbolic signi cance to his drawing? And isn’t it different if it is a 15 year old schoolboy? Revival? Return? Emergence of a hitherto unknown phenomenon which would need to be described in other terms? Dramatisation on the part of the Jews in France for whom, moreover, this would not spell the rst upsurge in anxiety since World War II? This book was born of a desire to know and understand what lies behind the feeling
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xxiii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM xxiv general introduction
that many people have that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism in France. Here general considerations, anchored in concerns which have already been the subject of various research studies on racism, anti-Semitism or Jewish identity are combined with an integrated set of eldwork studies and delve into places where anti-Semitism is either more likely to manifest itself than elsewhere or else to assume spectacular or clear-cut forms. This book therefore endeavours in the rst instance to examine tangible data, whether it be assaults and attacks, problems speci c to schools, tendencies and ‘incidents’ which rouse the public sphere and politico-intellectual life, while not neglecting the extreme right which is too often played down in current debate. It demonstrates how the Shoah, which for a long time was not an integral part of western politi- cal consciousness, has become established, providing, in the face of the threat of anti-Semitism, a protection which is weakened by competition between the victims, endeavours to banalise it, negationism or even accusations concerning the ‘Shoah business’. France is not the only country to be called into question. In many respects these questions are ‘global’ and inseparable—but to what extent?—from the Israeli- Palestinian con ict, the rise of Islamism and the broadcasting of hate speech targeting Jews from some Arab countries, where the virulence of the press is sometimes impressive.1 We have therefore decided to tackle the most controversial questions head-on. Could it be that contemporary anti-Semitism is linked to the exis- tence of a large Muslim population, or a population of North African immigrant descent? We carried out a survey in a particularly dif cult working-class area, in Roubaix, a town profoundly affected by the major crisis in industry in the 1980s and 1990s. We also met Muslims in prison. Could it be that anti-Semitism is promoted by the behaviour of the Jews in France, and their tendency to act as a visible collective entity? We analysed the general evolution of this community and we also car- ried out a long and painstaking eldwork study in Sarcelles, home to a sizeable Jewish population.
1 Translator’s note: In the French version of this book, a chapter is devoted to this press.
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Could anti-Semitism be the product of colonial history, with the ‘pieds-noirs’ as the heirs thereto? We went to meet them in Marseilles, a town where ‘nostAlgeria’ remains intense. As is suggested by the term ‘Islamo-progressivism’, which Alain Finkielkraut in particular is so fond of, anti-Semitism might owe a great deal to the merging of Islamism and the ‘progressive’ ideologies by which is meant leftist or neo-leftist, third-worldist type ideologies. In this case, some universities are said to be favourable areas where, in practice, these two currents are likely to converge and unite. To be quite clear about this, we went to several universities in the Parisian region. Are there good reasons in the present climate of opinion, for anti- Semitism in its most traditional forms or meanings to prosper or to acquire a new lease of life? It was with this in mind that we went to Alsace, a region where the desecration of Jewish cemeteries has long since been a speci city and where the existence of a robust, radical right leads one to believe that the traditional hatred of Jews might nd a political outlet there. If we are to believe the media, anti-Semitism is now very much alive in schools. We have here an urgent invitation to study schools and their capacity to confront new, or renewed challenges which could make them places which not only host but also have a hand in co-producing anti-Semitism. This research is the rst in-depth attempt to evaluate the extent of anti-Semitism in present-day France with the tools and the rigour of the social sciences. The CADIS (Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologiques) team which I set up and led, included both seasoned researchers and other less experienced young PhDs or doctoral students. The eldwork mobilised us, usually in pairs, and sometimes more; team meetings, on average twice a month, served to incorporate our observations and analyses into a comprehensive argument which my weekly seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales was an opportunity to con- solidate and systematise. The eldwork and the tasks were distributed as follows in my team: Philippe Bataille and Sébastien Delsalle in Roubaix ; Clarisse Buono , Alexandra Poli and Nikola Tietze dealt with the schools as well as Marseilles and, with Simonetta Tabboni, Sarcelles; Damien Guillaume and Emmanuel Kreis worked on the extreme right and Alsace; Svetlana Tabatchnikova , with Simonetta Tabboni and Jocelyne Ohana , studied the university; Farhad Khosrokhavar looked at Muslims in prison.
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The chapters which correspond to these eldwork studies were writ- ten by them, in close contact and in cooperation with myself. Fiam- metta Venner participated actively and always very constructively in the general team discussions; Jocelyne Ohana collated and updated a large amount of basic documentation. Moussa Khedimellah and Syl- vain Kerbourc’h helped to get the research in Roubaix off the ground. Christine Blanchard-Latreyte helped me to improve the form of this manuscript. Mireille Gaultier took on the arduous task of the manage- ment of this research programme.
This research would not have been possible without the involvement of several institutions. For their help and trust I would like to convey my heartfelt thanks to the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, its President, Simone Veil, and the board, beginning with Henri Hajdenberg, as well as two successive directors, Pierre Saragoussi and Anne-Marie Revcolevs- chi ; the Union sociale pour l’habitat and its delegate general, Paul-Louis Marty ; the Ministère de la Recherche, and the Minister, Claudie Haigneré ; the Institut des hautes études de sécurité intérieure, which was replaced by the Institut national des hautes études de sécurité, and their directors, Jean-Marc Berlioz and Régis Guyot. The founder and director of the Institut de recherche en sciences sociales in Hamburg, Jan Philipp Reemtsma , who was awarded the Heinz-Galinski prize in 2003 by the Jewish community in Berlin, insisted on donating all of the prize money to this research. I admit that my intellectual and professional relations with his institute are long-standing and very close. We mobilised a great number of people and built up numerous contacts and interviews for this research. It is impossible to list them all here and to thank them, all the more so as, for many, anonymity must be preserved.2 But all the materials which were gathered and produced by this research, transcriptions and recordings on cassette,
2 We have endeavoured, particularly in the chapters drawing directly on eldwork, to respect the anonymity of our numerous interlocutors, including sometimes by confusing the issue: the initials and the rst names are not necessarily the real ones and the institutions (for example the pre and post-16 educational establishments) are not generally named. Nevertheless, in some cases, we thought it essential to identify a person, a place, or an institution. We must make it clear here that the fact that we sometimes use rst names and sometimes M. or Mme. is a re ection of the relationship which developed on the ground between the interlocutor and the researchers. One sole initial A , B ., etc., indicates that a direct conversation has taken place in a spirit of trust but without using rst names.
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xxvi 7/30/2007 9:27:55 PM general introduction xxvii
are at the disposal of researchers who wish to have access to them. My sister, Annette, read a rst version of this book with great patience and suggested very useful corrections and adjustments which I used to good advantage. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all the members of the CADIS which, since it was founded by Alain Touraine, has provided a lively and stimulating intellectual environment. More particularly, I would like to thank Jacqueline Longérinas, without whom this research would not have been possible.
WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xxvii 7/30/2007 9:27:55 PM WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xviii 7/30/2007 9:27:54 PM PART ONE
BACKGROUND
WIEVIORKA_f2_1-4.indd 1 7/30/2007 2:46:54 PM WIEVIORKA_f2_1-4.indd 2 7/30/2007 2:46:54 PM INTRODUCTION
At the end of World War II, anti-Semitism seemed doomed to disappear from the face of the earth. Had it not been totally discredited once and for all by Nazism which had made of the slightest anti-Jewish remark a crime liable to lead to the worst abominations? In France, as in Europe, the phenomenon has not entirely disap- peared; for example, it was only in the mid 1960s that the Catholic Church published the aggiornamento in the Vatican II Concilium, thus ending what Jules Isaac has referred to as the “teaching of contempt”. But for some forty years, anti-Semitism was restricted, con ned to the private sphere, to the intimacy of feelings which can no longer nd expression in the public sphere, except amongst very small groups which are rapidly sanctioned by the law as soon as they achieve visibility. Fears that anti-Semitism might be making a comeback were rst aroused by the convergence of the extreme right, by now a political force, with negationism, which stated that the Nazi gas chambers had never existed, or that they were not intended to destroy the Jews, thus considerably playing down the extent of the genocide. The fear of this type of anti-Semitism was so great that when a terrorist attack was made on the synagogue in the Rue Copernic, in October 1980, the media reported that the vast majority of both the Jewish and non- Jewish population thought the extreme right was responsible. This in uenced those in charge of the inquiry, who, as a result, lost several months before it was established that the attack came, not from a small extremist French group such as the FANE (Fédération d’action natio- nale et européenne), but from the Abu Nidal group which claimed to be supporting the Palestinian cause, and was based at the time in the Middle East.1 At the beginning of the 21st century, fears have increased consid- erably. Hatred of Jews nds new sources in the drifting of a certain type of leftism and in the identi cation of a signi cant proportion
1 At the time, Annie Kriegel was the only person amongst the observers, intellectuals, journalists and politicians to make the correct diagnosis immediately. Cf. her Ré exions sur les questions juives, Paris, Hachette, 1984.
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of the immigrant population—in particular that of North African descent—with the Palestinian cause on the one hand and with radical Islamism on the other. The tangible manifestations of this renewal do not make of it a phenomenon integrated into a uni ed discourse or ideology. The new anti-Semitism—by whatever name it is known, and we shall come back to this point—is a phenomenon which springs up in several places and which, in the rst instance, must be evaluated by examining each of its various manifestations.
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WHAT DO THE STATISTICS TELL US?1
Let’s start with the acts of anti-Semitic violence which are serious enough to be listed in the of cial statistics (Ministry for Justice, Ministry for Home Affairs). These data refer to attacks against institutions and their property (synagogues, community centres, Jewish schools, cem- eteries, etc.) and against individuals (attacks, death threats, throwing of stones, etc.), or their property (notably vandalism).
What Data Do We Have?
The gures here have to be examined with caution. Victims may be frightened of making a complaint, or ashamed of the attack to which they have been subjected; institutions do not necessarily record all the acts which should be listed; nally, from one year to the next, the variations tell us more about the activities of the police or legal action, which may itself be subject to political demands of various weight than about the evolution of the phenomenon. Thus, as the inquiry carried out by Johan Weisz, published online by Proche-Orient.info (23 April 2003) demonstrates, with evidence from witnesses, it often happens that victims of anti-Semitic attacks are not really listened to by the police, or by the magistrates. The police refuse to make a formal record of their complaint, which becomes a mere entry in the daily log-book; or else, their complaint is led and the victim abandoned. Lastly, the legal system and the police do not always show a great deal of enthusiasm for in icting punishment or conducting an inquiry. The quali cation of violence as ‘anti-Semitic’ may be challenged: it is not because the victim of an offence or a crime is Jewish that the perpetrator has necessarily acted on grounds of anti-Semitism and it may be nothing more nor less than a common law offence, a question of
1 For this chapter, I am considerably indebted to Matthieu Bourrette, at the time the magistrate in charge of the Bureau des politiques pénales générales et de la Protection des libertés individueles at the Ministry for Justice for his help.
WIEVIORKA_f3_5-15.indd 5 7/30/2007 9:28:45 PM 6 chapter one
personal vengeance, a political affair, an accident, etc. Similarly, an act of violence may appear to be anti-Semitic, accompanied, for example, by anti-Jewish remarks, even though the victim is not Jewish. The detection rates for this type of violence are low, less than 20% and, moreover, vary depending on the type of the act: the police and the legal system have more success in solving cases of attacks on indi- viduals than those involving property or institutions. Crimes are solved primarily when the perpetrators are caught red-handed and rarely as the result of an inquiry. The gures concerning anti-Semitic violence vary depending on whether the source is the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Justice, Jewish organisations or anti-racist associations. What is meant by anti-Semitic violence is not clearly de ned but in 2002 a degree of standardisation was introduced. The data at our disposal since this date are the outcome of considerable politico-institutional changes. At the end of 2001 the publication of a dossier ‘the grim gures of anti-Semitism’ in the weekly publication L’Express, led to a somewhat acrimonious polemic, with the Representative Council for Jewish Insti- tutions in France (the CRIF) announcing much higher gures than the of cial ones.2 In April 2002, after a peak in anti-Semitic acts in the previous month, and in the context of a forthcoming presidential election, the government decided on a more active penal policy. But, at the time, the government did not have the IT tools to record the data appropriately and, until the Lellouche Law (3 February 2003), it was impossible to say whether a penal offence was anti-Semitic or not. The Lellouche law did not solve the issue entirely:3 it states that it is the circumstances which determine whether or not an act can be quali ed as anti-Semitic and which, if it is, make it more serious in the eyes of the law.4 However, it does underline the speci cally anti-Semitic nature of some of the affairs judged.
2 Since the beginning of the 1980s, in a report on the violent acts of which the Jew- ish communities were victims between September 2000 and September 2001 Shmuel Trigano reminds us that “the services of the Jewish community (Consistoire, Fonds social juif uni é, CRIF) “record incidents every single day” and “check in situ that the facts reported were correct”, Observatoire du monde juif, Bulletin no 1, November 2001. 3 According to the MP after whom the law was named, Pierre Lellouche, it was “tragically not applied”—the title of his article in Le Monde, 15 June 2004. 4 For example, violence which led to death although this was not the intention was subject to twenty years’ imprisonment instead of fteen if the motive was found to be anti-Semitism (but also racism or xenophobia).
WIEVIORKA_f3_5-15.indd 6 7/30/2007 9:28:45 PM what do the statistics tell us? 7
Another series of dif culties encountered by the agencies of the State in using computer technology to monitor the spread of anti- Semitic acts systematically stemmed from the risks which this practice might represent in the opinion of the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) which guarantees the liberty of the individual and which is particularly vigilant in the event that les are put together on Jewish persons. Since November 2003, the public prosecutor has systematically been sending the information to the central administration of the Ministry of Justice which can follow the progress of dossiers, case by case: ling of a complaint, complaint dismissed without action, decision of the public prosecutor’s of ce to take the case to court, judgement. Consistency with the gures supplied by the Ministry of the Interior is ensured and the CRIF has stopped speaking of underestimation. Moreover, the two ministries and the organisations of the Jewish community consult and brief each other regularly. The vigilance of the authorities at the moment, in particular in requesting rapid judicial responses to anti- Semitic acts means that the Jews as present or potential victims have better protection than those complaining of other forms of racism. Moreover, Jewish organisations tend to exert constant pressure for the acts which they consider to be anti-Semitic to be systematically recog- nised and dealt with as such by the police and the legal system. This is sometimes excessive because, as we have said, not all actions against Jews are necessarily of an anti-Semitic nature. This combination of public action and community mobilisation of Jews in France reinforces an image which can in itself nurture anti-Semitism: even as victims, do they not get better treatment than any other group?
The Perpetrators
Over and above the legitimate criticisms that this type of document usually provokes, the Annual Report of the Commission nationale consulta- tive des droits de l’homme did provide, in 2003, suf ciently conclusive ele- ments to enable us to learn some lessons.5 Whereas between 1995 and
5 Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme, 2003 La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. Rapport d’activité. Paris, La Documentation française, 2004. Cf. also the report of Jean-Christophe Ru n, “Chantier sur la lutte contre le racisme et
WIEVIORKA_f3_5-15.indd 7 7/30/2007 9:28:45 PM 8 chapter one
1999 the number of acts of anti-Semitic violence of cially registered remained below one hundred, the number rose to 743 in 2000, fell to 216 in 2001, rose again to 932 in 2002 and once again fell to 588 in 2003. Furthermore, with the exception of the year 2001, the number of injured (which was nil or in nitesimal until 1998), rose to 11 in 2000, then to 18 in 2002 and 21 in 2003. Moreover, between 1 January and 6 June 2004, the Ministry for Justice had to deal with over 180 offences (104 against property, 46 against individuals and 30 infractions by the press) which gave rise to 29 lawsuits. Approximately 16% of these offences were solved. Of the 61 perpetrators identi ed, 20 were adults and 41 were minors. Twenty- one of the forty-seven persons prosecuted were minors (in some cases several people were involved). The pro le of the perpetrators, once identi ed, is not very different from that of those involved in classi- cal urban crime, nor is the judicial treatment which awaits them. For adults, the court hearing takes place immediately and the sentence is community service (TIG-Travail d’Intérêt general), rather than prison, with a suspended sentence rather than gaol. Numerous observers have suggested a link between the political situ- ation in the Middle East and the rise in acts of anti-Semitic violence in France. It is true that the outbreak of the second intifada (in September 2000) provoked a rise in the gures,6 and, on several occasions, in 2002 and 2003, peaks of anti-Semitism in France coincided with important events linked to the Israeli-Palestine con ict. But since then it would appear that the phenomenon of anti-Semitic violence, after having been sustained by international events, has become self-suf cient so to speak, remaining at a high level and no longer being dependent on distant events: in 2003 and 2004, anti-Semitism was ever present and had its own agenda which, from then on, had little to do with events abroad. For all that, this does not necessarily mean that it does not have anything to do with international problems and, in particular, those in the Middle East.
l’antisémitisme”, Ministère de l’Intérieur, de la Sécurité intérieure et des Libertés locales, which includes a series of analyses and suggestions for action, October 2004. 6 The Union des étudiants juifs de France and SOS Racisme jointly published a book, Les Antifeujs, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2002, with an eloquent subtitle which dates the present wave of anti-Semitic violence back to the beginning of the second intifada: Le Livre blanc des violences antisémites en France depuis septembre 2000.
WIEVIORKA_f3_5-15.indd 8 7/30/2007 9:28:45 PM what do the statistics tell us? 9
On the whole,7 acts of anti-Semitic violence are the outcome of restricted interaction, or are the work of individuals or even, more frequently, of small spontaneous groups who have prepared them in haste—which complicates the task of investigators who are better at identifying, or even, in ltrating structures or organised networks. Most actions, at least of those recorded, target Jewish institutions: attempted arson, vandalism, stone throwing and, more frequently, anti-Semitic graf ti. The perpetrators are rarely caught. When they are caught, as we noted above, this tends to be for attacks on individuals. The offenders are often young with a low level of educa- tion—in court, magistrates and observers are struck by their dif culty in expressing themselves. The majority of their offences are very far from any sort of intellectualisation and the perpetrators themselves are frequently described as being unbalanced, irresponsible and having psychological dif culties. While many of those who are identi ed are of North African immigrant origin, they are rarely in the tutelage of any community, mosque or imam. They are frequently already known to the police and have already been sentenced for petty crime. At the time of the offences, they are often under the in uence of alcohol, have nothing to do and are angry and are not under the in uence of any sort of radical ideology. Moreover, in many cases, anti-Semitism surfaces during a quarrel—a quarrel with the neighbours, or with a business partner, or when a relationship with representatives in the public sphere or of any form of authority deteriorates. Alsace is a special case with the violence having its origin, here more than elsewhere, in the extreme right, of the neo-Nazi or skinhead vari- ety, in particular taking the form of the desecration of tombs in Jewish cemeteries and threats against individuals. Finally, in 2004, attacks targeted individuals, including their homes, their cars or their houses which had graf ti scrawled on them, and were to round out the repertory of violence which, until then, had been restricted to institutions, and therefore to the Jewish community as such. From then on, it was to be individuals who were threatened or attacked as Jews. Below are some illustrations of these different scenarios.
7 Our remarks here are based on several sources, legal and others, including the sum- maries “of ongoing and closed legal proceedings concerning court actions against the perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts and threats” posted regularly on the CRIF website.
WIEVIORKA_f3_5-15.indd 9 7/30/2007 9:28:45 PM 10 chapter one
In Colmar, in April 2002, six youths of North African descent, made an explosive device using a re extinguisher and used it in an attempt to destroy the oratory of the Jewish cemetery in Cronenbourg. Five of them were known to the police, three for previous acts of anti-Semitism and two for drug offences. In Montpellier, in June 2002, an 18 year old, Abdeslam,8 along with two minors, Saïd (17 years old and already sentenced ve times for theft) and Mustapha (16 years old and already prosecuted twice for robbery with violence), threw stones and a bottle of beer onto the roof of a synagogue from the window of a neighbouring apartment. When the police arrived, they noted that all three had already been drinking beer and had smoked cannabis. Abdeslam, who was ‘under the in uence of alcohol’, fought with the police. Once again in Montpellier, two months earlier, Morad (an agricul- tural worker born in 1977), Jamali (born in 1978, unemployed) and Hakim (born in 1982, unemployed), ‘after an evening of drinking and idleness’ as stated in the judgement, decided ‘to do a synagogue’. They found one by asking a passer-by the way and threw Molotov cocktails through the window. They were arrested by a police patrol as they cruised slowly past the same synagogue a few minutes later in a BMW to witness the result of their actions. The judgement states: “No link has been established between the three who were sentenced and any Islamic fundamentalist movements.” In Villeurbanne, in 2003, Raabah insulted his neighbour, “[. . .] lthy Jew, lthy youd [. . .] we’ll get you, you’ll end up behind bars, Hitler didn’t nish the job, and we’re going to nish you off”, and threw stones at him. The sentence (six months’ imprisonment) re ected that the family of the victim had been terrorised by Raabah for a long time (insults, swastikas drawn on the door, refuse tipped out in front of it). In Dijon, Mehdi (born in 1984), who was sentenced on 5 March 2004, had insulted a railway (SNCF) employee the day before, calling him a ‘ lthy Jew’, and attacked two others. He had already been sentenced for committing acts of violence against public sector workers. In Grasse in 2003, when arrested by the police who took him to the station, Chatir used anti-Semitic language which increased his sentence
8 We have decided not to quote any family names and to mention only rst names.
WIEVIORKA_f3_5-15.indd 10 7/30/2007 9:28:45 PM what do the statistics tell us? 11
(for carrying an offensive weapon), attacking the most senior of the examining magistrates in Antibes with the words: [. . .] F*** your race—fat swine of a Jew—fat Jewish piece of shit—we’re going to get, all you French and Jews—I only obey the law of Allah. . . . He put my wife in prison; I’m going to get him. Thus, as a crime punishable by law, anti-Semitic violence is an undeni- able phenomenon today, though not, as yet, fatal. Its rise dates from the second intifada, but it was already at work long before. The major- ity of those mobilised are young people of immigrant origin, people without roots who do not depend—or in any event not directly—on organised networks or communities for ideology or structure. It is not therefore an active expression of radical Islam and there are cases, especially in Alsace, where it seems rather to come from the extreme right. The violence recorded by the police and the legal system is a move to action. It erupts and breeds in a context in which other forms of anti-Semitism are also developing, and, in this respect, it is effectively an element which is part and parcel of one and the same scene—a scene which is apparently fragmented and disunited. The perpetrators of serious acts of violence (and let us remember that these cases are rarely solved) are involved in a move to action which is not exactly of the same order as the breaking down of taboos on the Jewish question in the remarks made by young people. The often exag- gerated ‘affairs’, scandals, accusations or suspicions with respect to the Jews which plague the public sphere are of a different nature: they bear witness to the inability of French society to construct the discussions and policies which the ethnicisation of community life, the crisis in the institutions of the Republic or social exclusion demand. Moreover, the fact that ‘North Africans’ (or any other term referring to the populations of immigrant origin from the Arab-Muslim world) have now joined the ranks of those involved in anti-Semitism does not mean an end to the existence of the traditional culprits, hankering for times past, or those promoting a ‘new right’: skinheads, neo-Nazis, extreme right ideolo- gists, not to mention the Front national. Serious violence is one of many elements in the fragmented arena of anti-Semitism in our time, which allows a considerable number of amalgams and many unfounded accusa- tions to be made. For, as long as a case remains unsolved by the courts all sorts of hypotheses can be envisaged; any group, origin, religion, or ideology can be accused or suspected without any proof.
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What the Opinion Polls Say
In this confused situation, the statistics of acts of violence—be they of cial or from Jewish or anti-racist organisations, are not the only statistical evidence of the spread of the disease—and, as we saw, they are not entirely reliable. Opinion polls can provide complementary information. Thus, making a comparative analysis of data from vari- ous opinion polls carried out between 1988 and 2000, Nonna Mayer and Guy Michelat state, “There is not more anti-Semitism in French society, but there are fewer people who are ashamed of being anti- Semitic. More people now dare to say aloud what they think.” They say that it is: in working-class and poorly educated environments, amongst those elderly people who are most right-wing, authoritarian and concerned for their future that the rejection of Jewish people is at its most pronounced and maintain that, “it beats all the records in two categories, the Gaullist right on the one hand and the practising Catholics on the other”.9 The most recent opinion poll which Mayer and Michelat draw on was in 2000 and it is possible that more recent data still would lead to a slight difference in the ndings which, ultimately, tend to suggest a rise or a hardening of traditional anti-Semitism which is anti-Jewish or nationalist in origin, rather than an actual renewal. It is also possible that this type of opinion poll either leaves to one side, or underestimates in its samples, the sectors harbouring the ‘new Judeophobia’ as noted by Pierre-André Taguieff on Islam and populations of North African descent.10 The fact remains that as an opinion or a prejudice, “the ‘new’ anti-Semitism is uncannily like the old”, Nonna Mayer declares in answer precisely to Pierre-André Taguieff’s arguments. But there is one important point which cannot be ignored which emerges from an analysis of the opinion polls: yes, anti-Semitism, as an opinion or
9 Guy Michelat and Nonna Mayer, “Le racisme en France à l’aune des sondages”, Historiens et géographes, n° 385, January 2004. 10 Nonna Mayer, “La France n’est pas antisémite”, Le Monde, 4 April 2004. Pierre- André Taguieff complains that the opinion polls on which Nonna Mayer bases her information only enable “the evaluation of the persistence of traditional anti-Semitism” and do not provide “speci c information on the representation of Jewish people in the worlds of the “suburban youths” who are “opposed to Zionism in the name of anti-racism, and defend negationism in the name of freedom of speech”, in “Retour sur la nouvelle judéophobie”, Cités, June 2002, pp. 117–144.
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as a form of prejudice which comes out when the population is asked whether or not “the Jews have too much power in France” or whether “the Jews are French like other people”, is on the rise in France, and not only—and this is the main point—amongst young people of immigrant origin. Its return, if not its renewal, is also manifest in the circles which are traditionally favourable to it. This lends weight to the hypothesis that we are dealing with a fragmented phenomenon which is developing in quite diverse sections of French society and for reasons which are not necessarily homogeneous or coherent, so much so that it is dif cult to consider it a single entity. Violent or destructive behaviour is one thing, opinions are another. The same analysis cannot explain at one and the same time, how, for example, young people who are excluded and themselves the victims of racism can become perpetrators, and how opinion hostile to Jewish people evolves in French society. In other words, the analysis has everything to gain from not amalgamating into an a priori image of one and the same phenomenon rationales which undoubtedly communicate and foster links but which are nonetheless autonomous. The incidence of anti-Semitism in French public opinion does not shed light directly on the upsurge of acts of violence target- ing Jewish people: these are forms of anti-Semitism which are more appropriately dealt with separately.
Observing Anti-Semitism, Observing Racism
Unlike other forms of racism, in particular racism targeting populations of North African or Sub-Saharan African origin, the major character- istic of hatred of Jews is not that it is grounds for discrimination, seg- regation or social exclusion. Religion is not the most important aspect, unlike the feelings directed at Islam. There is some concern about the in uence which Jews are said to exert in all sorts of areas; they are associated with power, with money and a capacity for manipulation; it is fraught with jealousy and resentment rather than contempt. Sometimes those who study anti-Semitism are accused of being indifferent or blind to other forms of racism, and vice versa. In fact, the two problems are suf ciently different for them to be dealt with separately, and even for it to be recognised that they constitute two distinct phenomena, and not one. This does not mean to say that they are in no way related. On the contrary: we will be able to see how anti-North African racism in particular nurtures a suffering which may
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well end in anti-Semitism. Nor does this mean that any mobilisation against the two forms of racism should be organised separately. Until the beginning of the 1990s there were even the makings for their inte- gration, in particular within SOS Racism, an organisation in which, as Nicolas Weill11 did well to remind us, the Gulf War saw a parting of ways: Jewish intellectuals tended to approve of the French involvement in this war, unlike the militants of North African immigrant origin. In this instance, one might even be tempted to draw a parallel with the American experience in which numerous intellectuals and left-wing Jewish militants participated in the struggle of the 1950s for equal civil rights for Black Americans, whereas today there is considerable distance between the Jewish and the Black American movements, some of which, like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, have veered towards anti-Semitism. However, we still have to tread carefully; the rapprochement between Jews and Black Americans in the 1950s was not that widespread and not all Jewish intellectuals are responsible for the distance in France today. Moreover, the latest development of SOS Racism indicates a erce mobilisation against anti-Semitism which is clearly differentiated from other forms of racism against which the movement also continues to mobilise. Our perceptions of anti-Semitism and of other forms of racism are not formed in the same way. In France, the Jewish world is politically and culturally active and, while it would be wrong to say that all the Jews in this country recognise themselves as being part of a community, it is nonetheless true that there are community organisations which are capable of community mobilisation, in particular in the face of anti- Semitism. The mere observation of the facts, the collection of data, the pressure on politicians to take action, on the media to react, on intellectuals to take positions, on the police and judiciary to be ef cient and rm mean that the most aggressive forms of anti-Semitism are a phenomenon which is now very much to the fore in public debate. The same is not true of anti-North African racism or of Islamophobia,12 about which our information is much less precise and systematic. What observatory, for example, would keep, for anti-North African racism, records of hostile actions as full and as detailed as those of the CRIF
11 Nicolas Weill, Une histoire personnelle de l’antisémitisme, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003. 12 This concept is based on Vincent Geisser’s book, La Nouvelle Islamophobie, Paris, La Découverte, 2003.
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which regularly records all sorts of events very precisely, going so far as to include, for example, for January 2004, in Ile-de-France: “a swastika and the words ‘death to Jews’ [. . .] reported on the walls of a building in Allée Brindeau in the 19th district of Paris” or, for February 2004, the fact that: “in the 6th district of Paris, a Jew who had left his car in a bus lane for a moment to deliver a letter was called ‘a lthy Jew’ by the driver?” It is not a question of criticising such extreme vigilance. We only wish that similar resources were put into observing other forms of racism and, as a result, into exerting legitimate pressure. In the absence of these resources, the victimised groups are more likely to fall prey to people who use their distress for their own ends; the racism to which they are subjected is taken in hand by moral entrepreneurs including political, ideological or religious movements which put their own interpretation on the experience, even if it means constructing imaginary or distant issues from which anti-Semitism can emerge. At the end of the 1980s, it appeared to us to be urgent to launch a research programme on racism in France13 and to show that anti-Arab or anti-North African racism was not limited to its political manifesta- tions alone, embodied by the Front national. At the time, anti-Semitism was not as alarming a reality as today, even if its renewal was already noticeable.14 But today, research and action alike, must be mobilised on the two fronts of racism and anti-Semitism. Hence this book which, in some ways, complements the research published in La France raciste, and which unfortunately has lost none of its freshness or topicality. It is true that, on the whole, in France people are now protesting much more rapidly, sometimes even too much so, about anti-Semitism than about other forms of racism. But this is neither a reason to refuse to acknowledge its spread nor to dispense with the attempt to understand it.
13 Michel Wieviorka et al. La France raciste, Paris, Le Seuil, 1992. 14 We carried out a study on this phenomenon in Sarcelles as early as 1991–92, cf. Nacira Guénif, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Paul Zawadski (edited by Michel Wieviorka), “L’expérience de l’antisémitisme à Sarcelles”, in Pour une sociologie du racisme. Trois études. Rapport d’étude, CADIS/CNRS-EHESS, 1993.
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IN SCHOOLS
Although they should be a haven of tolerance and were established with the aim of ensuring that all pupils gain access to reason and the universal; although they were supposed to protect them not only from the violence which prevails in the outside world but also from the barriers to socialisation which exist in society in general and in the more limited circles to which they belong, in particular family or community; although they are placed under the protection of a motto proclaiming liberty, equality and fraternity, state schools, more than anywhere else, are the places where the renewal of anti-Semitism in our time crystallises. That is why Emmanuel Brenner and a collective of teachers—in a book which created a considerable stir, particularly amongst the Jewish community in France—were able to speak of the ‘Republic’s lost territories’.1
The Many Guises of Anti-Semitism
In the rst instance, state schools are a sphere in which we encounter forms of anti-Semitic violence which appear to be an extension of those which exist in society. These acts rarely give rise to legal action. They are the work of minors and schools usually think that they can deal with them themselves. Furthermore, considerable progress has been made by the Ministry of Education since 2003; amongst other measures, there has been an improvement in the systematic recording of the facts (attacks, destruction and other acts of a fairly serious nature) at national level, but also in all sorts of initiatives undertaken by the local education authorities (Académies) or even by the schools.2 The report of the Commission national consultative des droits de l’homme (2003), to which we referred above, lists 12 violent anti-Semitic incidents and 80 anti-Semitic
1 Emmanuel Brenner (editor), Les Territoires perdus de la République. Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002. 2 For further information about this subject, see Part Six.
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threats in schools in 2000, ve and 25 in 2001, 30 and 47 in 2002 and 22 and 63 in 2003: it is obvious that these gures underestimate the phenomenon. They do not take into account many acts and threats which the victims have not reported, along with the high degree of passivity resulting from ignorance, indifference and a lack of understand- ing on the part of the teaching or administrative staff in the schools. ‘Becoming resigned’ or ‘giving up’ to use the words of Brenner and his co-authors is obviously not the rule; but it is frequent and we shall come back to them in this book. It is often reinforced by the anti-racist feelings of those who do not wish to challenge the culprits when the latter, as is frequently the case, are of North African immigrant origin and, as a result, are themselves victims of deep-rooted racism. In schools, anti-Semitic violence—which is only one element in a much wider picture of violence in schools3—can be serious. In recent years, several incidents have been reported in which a pupil, boy or girl, was bullied and humiliated for being Jewish for weeks on end. But apparently it is now frequent to hear remarks hostile to Jews being expressed openly, between pupils, in the playground and in the corridors, sometimes even in class, or else in relation to teachers, the supervisors or the heads of the school. It is true that in France the ethnicisation of social relations has become so widespread that individuals increasingly tend to use categories of religion or national origin to refer to each other as if it were natural without this necessarily being done aggres- sively—but the transition from the commonplace epithet to hate-speech is rapid, especially when it is a question of Jews and of interactions with young people of North African immigrant descent. The move to action here is a move to words, to the breaking down of the taboo which, until only a few years ago, surrounded everything to do with Jewish people, beginning with their very name: we no lon- ger use the old vocabulary which referred to them as ‘Israelites’, often as a precaution, and there is much less use than in the past of the sort of lthy vocabulary of the type, for example, which Céline used speci cally for Jewish people. We say ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewess’ quite simply or,
3 At the beginning of the school year 2001–2002 the Ministry of Education, using the SIGNA software, set up a scheme for reporting acts of violence in secondary schools. In 2002–2003, “racist threats”—the only category under which anti-Semitism could be recorded, represented only 1.2% of all the acts recorded. The acts are recorded by the schools as coming under one of the following categories: acts which are obvi- ously criminal; acts which have been reported to the police; acts which have caused a considerable stir in the educational community.
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‘Feuj’—a slang term used in the suburbs of Paris—which, in some cases, is only an objective expression for a relation experienced in ethnic terms but which, in others, enables the speaker to insult, humiliate and abuse a person very directly. The Jew or the Feuj is then the personi cation of evil, the word, as Brenner notes, “amounts to an insult and is self- suf cient”4—“a feuj pen”, commented the Minister for Education, Luc Ferry, at the press conference for Dix Mesures pour lutter contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme dans les établissements scolaires, “is a pen which does not work”.5 The move to words does not simply concern a small minority of somewhat rootless individuals, as in the cases of the incidents which end up in the courts, or which ought to end up there: it is widespread and con rmed by countless witnesses.6 Anti-Semitic graf ti and swastikas are everyday occurrences on the walls of some pre and post-16 educational establishments and even inside the school building, sometimes even on the notice boards. Attacks and beating up of Jewish pupils which go well beyond mere insults are reported in the schoolyard, in the vicinity or even on the sports grounds. Death threats do not only concern pupils but may also target teachers or members of the governing body of the educational institutions. Anti-Semitic violence in schools is inseparable from an ideological climate and a set of images and opinions which always include the same elements: Jewish people, traditionally de ned by their power in politics, the economy and the media, are associated both with the State of Israel and the politics of Ariel Sharon. They are said to behave today towards the Palestinians as the Nazis behaved towards them half a century earlier; they are thought to be enemies of Islam and possibly in collusion with the United States. This is all frequently summed up in graf ti (often in swastikas) or expressions of the type: ‘ lthy Jew!’, ‘F*** the Jews!’, ‘Down with the Jews!’, ‘Death to Jews!’. Thus the head of the Beaumarchais School in Paris, interviewed by the Stasi Commission on secularism in September 2003, commented: Jewish children are frequently the victims of anti-Semitic remarks—‘ lthy Jew’ is the one most frequently heard and the mildest. (These remarks . . .) have been accompanied, since events which there is no need to recall,
4 Emmanuel Brenner, op. cit., p. 28. 5 Libération, 28 February 2003. 6 Cf. for example Emmanuel Brenner, op. cit.
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with ‘Long live Bin Laden!’ which I hear in the corridors all day long even though we are battling against it the whole time. Expressions of hatred are mainly to be found outside the classes, some- times incited by Islamist militants, such as these monitors who spread their negationist7 ideology in schools and who were mentioned by sev- eral of the teachers who participated in the collective led by Brenner. Anything concerning history and geopolitics is particularly sensitive. As a result, some lessons become an opportunity for the expression of hostility towards Jewish people: the content of what is said about World War II, the Shoah, the Middle East and the United States is challenged in terms which can become extreme—but are not neces- sarily tempered. Mara Goyet describes thus how third year pupils in her school reacted when they were invited to the theatre to see a play about a Jewish family during World War II: The lights went out and the chaos began. For one and a half hours the pupils shouted, laughed and insulted the actors. They shouted, “Strip, you bitch!” at a woman wearing a concentration camp uniform and “Paedo- phile!” at a father saying goodbye to his child. Others shouted, “Get in the showers!” [. . .]. One of the actors came on stage to announce that the company refused to take a curtain call. Some of the teachers were in tears [. . .]. The malaise affected everyone. One of the pupils got up on the stage and shouted to his comrades: “Muslim brothers, my brothers, what we have done is bad—we didn’t respect the work of these actors . . .” For the next few days, the school was in turmoil and discussions were held with the pupils. They decided to apologise . . .8 Similarly, Michaël Sebban, a philosophy teacher in a state secondary school in Seine Saint-Denis gives us an illustration of the unstable nature of their attitudes, but this time to the other extreme: “In the top class, they read Primo Levi because it is on the list of set books. They weep. Afterwards, they go out into the street and say the Jews are bastards”.9
7 Cf. in particular the evidence from Barbara Lefebvre, pp. 95–99 and Sophie Fer- hadjian, pp. 99–105 in Emmanuel Brenner, op. cit. 8 Mara Goyet, Collèges de France, Paris, Fayard, 2003, pp. 89–90. 9 Interview published online by Proche-Orient.info, 3 May 2004.
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The Extent of the Disaster
It is impossible to quantify anti-Semitism in schools given the number of different forms that it can take and the extent to which its assess- ment varies depending on the individual, the criteria used and the real knowledge they have of certain problems. Interaction between pupils may end in anti-Semitic remarks. Are such remarks the outcome of a difference of opinion which began with criteria other than racial ones, or were they based on racial hatred from the outset? A Jewish child is the victim of an extortion racket: does this have anything to do with his Jewish identity? Another child is bullied to such an extent that it is a real ordeal of insults and violence about which he says nothing for fear and shame: none of this will appear in any document. Once the head of the establishment has been informed he remains silent and does nothing: the information is no longer made public. Between doing too much and doing too little, dramatisation and silence, it is impossible to obtain an accurate picture of the extent of the phenomenon. But it is clear that it is widespread and often rather diffuse, taking the form of abuse, insults and threats, tags and graf ti or else the everyday use of the disquali er ‘Jews’. The threats and attacks are often, but not exclusively, carried out by pupils of North African immigrant descent and, that being the case, are often, but not necessarily, laden with references to the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian con ict or radical Islam. In these instances, there is a hatred of the State of Israel which makes little distinction between its politics, its government (Ariel Sharon), its existence, its historical project (Zionism) and Jewish people in general. These may be made by very young people, but for all that, they are not con ned to schools in what are referred to as ‘dif cult areas’: they can also be found, for example, in pre and post-16 educational establishments in Paris which are not particularly ‘sensitive’. Hatred of Jews emerges in the classroom and not only in the schoolyard, in the corridors or outside the school, especially when the subject-matter or content of the lesson lends itself to it, which is particularly true of history. But how widespread is the phenomenon? Here we have the ndings of a survey carried out in 2003 on the ini- tiative of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah and the Association des professeurs d’histoire-géographie, the APHG, who sent its 5,344 members a
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questionnaire and obtained 641 replies.10 While bearing in mind the methodological limits of its approach, the study does bring to light the existence of a real problem, but a minority one. A summary of the report put the proportion of institutions in which incidents had occurred in class at 15.9%. Not all of the incidents reported were anti- Semitic by any manner of means. The majority of the incidents which occurred were by and large related to religion—and here anti-Semitism is secondary. Speci cally anti-Semitic incidents emerge in class when it is a question of World War II, the Shoah or the Middle East. They may take the form of provocation—“the teachers have little dif culty in countering them but they make the classes tiresome and, in the long run, exhausting”. The report also points to incidents relating to teach- ing which deals with the Middle East which “express either partial or total disagreement with the policy of the State of Israel for some and of the Palestinian Authority for others” and which are “often likened erroneously to anti-Semitism”. The report also points to incidents which refer to the Algerian War or which “re ect the malaise of pupils who can no longer bear to be presented as ‘of immigrant descent’”. It also notes that in some classes “the study of the United States and its foreign policy in particular is now beginning to provoke hostile reactions”. In short, this report is an invitation not to over dramatise problems which should not be denied or underestimated and in which anti-Semitism itself is only one of many elements. It notes that “frequently it is a case of ‘somewhat heated discussions’ rather than of incidents as such”. It deplores the fact that the media overestimate them. It is tting that a document like the APGH Report should qualify the impression gained by reading a book like Emmanuel Brenner’s. The lat- ter has the merit of drawing attention to the problem of the ‘territories lost to the Republic’. But, by referring only to the elements which can support his thesis—and which are striking—the book does not enable us to evaluate the wrongs which he describes, and it may even aston- ish teachers who work in schools where there are not any problems. State schools are not all or permanently in ames; anti-Semitism is not entrenched. But it is taking root and obviously cannot be attributed
10 Our remarks here are based on the report by Bernard Phan, vice-president of the Association des professeurs d’histoire-géographie: Des dif cultes pour enseigner l’histoire et la géographie? September 2003.
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solely to rootless individuals in disarray, as tends to be the explanation when the most serious forms of violence come to court. There is indeed a problem which is speci c to state schools, a form of anti-Semitism in schools which is not simply an extension of the general anti-Semitism in society. It is important to question exactly how schools help to produce it: we shall come back to this.
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CHANGES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Another new development in the anti-Semitism of our time concerns the public sphere, constantly stirred up by various issues which are, in fact, the makings of new forms of political and intellectual life. Until the 1990s the anti-Semitism which attracted media attention was mainly a traditional form—at least in its most deeply rooted guises. However, its renewal could be observed quite early on, not so much in the nature of the themes propounded which remained the traditional ones—hatred of Jews as the evil personi cation of money, power, the media and, possibly, of the Revolution or of Bolshevism, to which can be added hostility to the State of Israel. A new set of arguments was put forward after the war by ‘revisionism’; these either underestimated or banalised the Shoah or else, more frequently, denied that it had ever taken place. ‘Negationism’ (or historical revisionism) even went as far as accusations denouncing the Shoah as a ‘business’.
The Successes of Negationism
Negationism consists in denying the intention of the Third Reich to destroy the European Jews, the use of the gas chambers to this end and the systematic annihilation of this group of human beings. It began with the rst ideological partnership formed by Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier.1 Maurice Bardèche was an extreme right activist who was also the brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach whose name he wished to clear. Rassinier was a former deportee, a man of the left, who started out socialist and strongly anti-communist, a paci- st, who, for a time was associated with the Fédération anarchiste (in the 1950s and 1960s) and whom Valérie Igounet, in her excellent Histoire du négationnisme, describes as “a godsend for the extreme right”.2 What
1 Nadine Fresco has written a biography of Paul Rassinier, Fabrication d’un antisémite, Paris, Le Seuil, 1999. 2 Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 2000, p. 33.
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brought the two men together was not hatred of the Jews, but of Com- munism. For, one of the founding concepts of what was, at the outset, merely revisionism, is the idea that Nazism was not the only form of barbarism: there was also Bolshevism and Communism. For them, the dramatisation of communist crimes went hand in hand with the banalisation of those committed by the Nazis. A new theme emerged fairly rapidly in these rst revisions of history. This was anti-Zionism. It was already linked to the theory that the destruction of the Jews was an invention aimed at ensuring the success of the State of Israel. In Paul Rassinier’s words: This lie (the destruction of six million Jews) was told to procure the funds required to set up the State of Israel (German indemnities proportionate to the number of Jewish victims).3 The extreme right’s criticism of Zionism was to become more focused a little later, at the time of the Six Day War (1967), making no distinc- tion between hatred for the State of Israel and hatred for the supposed power of the Jews of the Diaspora. Negationism, which had had no particular impact on public opinion until then, was revived in the 1970s by the forming of a new alli- ance—that of Robert Faurisson, an academic specialising in literature, who went much further than Rassinier and Bardèche by denying out- right the existence of the gas chambers, at least those intended for the destruction of the Jews, and Pierre Guillaume, an extreme left activist. In an interview published in L’Express (October 1978), the former Com- missioner for Jewish Affairs in Vichy, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had taken refuge in Spain, broke a taboo by declaring, “In Auschwitz, only the eas were gassed.” Robert Faurisson took this opportunity to broadcast his ideas. He explained in an interview on Europe 1: The so-called massacre of the Jews and the so-called existence of the gas chambers is simply one and the same politico- nancial scam. The main bene ciaries are the State of Israel and the international Zionist movement, and the main victims are the German people, excluding its leaders, and the entire Palestinian nation. Faurisson was quickly joined by Pierre Guillaume, himself backed, for a while at least, by a few friends, extreme left, libertarian and other
3 In Le Drame des juifs européens, rst published in 1964 and then re-published in 1984 by La Vieille Taupe.
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militants, including Serge Thion and Gaby Cohn-Bendit (who distanced themselves fairly rapidly) and Gabor Rittersporn. Furthermore, the linguist, Noam Chomsky, in the name of freedom of speech, prefaced a book by Faurisson, who was to explain later that without this back- ing “the adventure would have gone no further after the death of Rassinier in 1967”.4 The public outcry which ensured the success of the Faurisson/Guil- laume partnership owed a great deal to the inadequacies of histori- ography, and perhaps even to the self-satisfaction of French historians who, even in February 1979, thought it sufficient, in response to Faurisson’s arguments, to publish a text signed by 34 of them in Le Monde stating: The question is not how, technically, a mass murder of this sort was possible. It was technically possible because it took place. This has to be the starting point of any historical inquiry into the subject [. . .] There is not, and there cannot be, any discussion about the existence of the gas chambers. As Valérie Igounet reminds us,5 Faurisson was delighted when he read this text: “I had won! If 34 historians met to write this sort of non- sense, it was because they could not answer.” Pierre Vidal-Naquet, one of the signatories, explained, in a discussion with Paul Thibaud and Serge Thion, that as far as he was concerned, “one cannot challenge something which is obvious”.6 In the 1980s, revisionism was energetically challenged7 on two fronts. On the one hand, it was criminalised and became, not a mere variant of incitation to racial hatred, but the object of speci c legal treatment, in particular in the Gayssot Law (13 July 1990). On the other hand, historians began to establish the facts with increasing precision, an important starting point being a colloquium organised in 1982 at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) by François Furet and Raymond Aron on ‘Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews’.8
4 In “Les révisionnistes proposent un débat public”, Annales d’histoire révisionniste, spring 1988, no 4, p. 18. 5 Valérie Igounet, op. cit., p. 240. 6 Id., p. 242. 7 Amongst the rst to be concerned was Nadine Fresco, “Les redresseurs de morts”, Les Temps Modernes, June 1980, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la Mémoire, Paris, La Découverte, 1987. 8 Colloquium published under this title by Gallimard/Le Seuil in 1982.
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A key participant in this wake-up call to historians, the surprise star of the colloquium in question, was an unusual person, Jean-Claude Pressac, a pharmacist who had initially worked with Faurisson before distancing himself from him once he had established the historical truth of the gas chambers, not on the basis of testimonies but on the basis of the study of technical dossiers (on incineration and gassing, with the aid of architectural plans or bills from rms.)9 Thereafter, negationism hit the headlines several times, especially with scandals in which the University was implicated by association (the negationist PhD thesis defended by Henri Roques at the Université de Nantes in June 1985, the publication in the academic journal, Économies et Sociétés in August 1989 of an article by Bernard Notin attacking the Jewish ‘lobby’, an attack which was repeated from the stronghold of negationism, the Université Lyon-III, etc.). In the 1990s others took over, in particular Roger Garaudy, who took issue over the ‘brainwashing’ on the Shoah and the gures usually quoted, and who was supported by Abbé Pierre. But the most important issue lay elsewhere. It consisted in the Front national’s taking up the issue of negationism. This occurred most probably in the mid-1980s and was obviously aimed at banalising the Shoah, a point to which we shall return. In October 1985, during the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge festival at Le Bourget, Jean-Marie Le Pen attacked Jean-François Kahn, Jean Daniel, Yvan Levaï and Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, referring to them by name, describing them as “all liars in the press in this country. These people are a disgrace to their profession”. Everyone understood that he was targeting journal- ists whom he presumed to be Jewish. In autumn 1987, a few weeks after the showing of the lm Shoah, he said on television that the gas chambers were “a mere detail of World War II”. Valérie Igounet tells how this remark was prepared and tested and was not an unintended blunder. On 2 September 1988 at the Front national’s summer school at Cap d’Agde, the leader of the Front national using the name of the Minister, Durafour, made a play on words on ‘Durafour crématoire’.10 In case the message was not self-explanatory, the press close to his movement explained that if you were going to protest against Nazi
9 Cf. Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the Gas Chambers, New York, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989. 10 Translator’s note: ‘Durafour-crématoire’ was a pun on ‘four crématoire’, French for crematorium.
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crematoria, then you should protest against those who burn aborted foetuses every day. Today the revisionist version of anti-Semitism is widespread in France, as a result of the inroads made by the declarations of the leader of the Front national. It is no longer a strange anomaly, the meeting of the anti-communist and libertarian obsessions and the traditional extreme right targets for hatred. It is now a phenomenon which, all the more potent for having gained ground amongst the radical right, has spread to the Middle East from where it is imported, then re-exported in the form of books, cassettes or via the Internet to the working-class areas and the mosques where radical Islam holds sway—we shall come back to this.
Maintaining Traditional Anti-Semitism
Apart from the ideological and political organisation of the spread of negationism, in the 2000s, a number of events were to point to sup- port for an older, traditional type of anti-Semitism, nationalist even religious and anti-Jewish in nature. At the same time, sometimes exces- sive vigilance was exercised with respect to anything which seemed to express it. An incident in the media was evidence of a certain degree of his- torical continuity, namely the ‘Renaud Camus affair’. This writer, who is somewhat affected and aesthetic, was accused of anti-Semitism by various journalists and intellectuals (starting with Marc Weitzman of the Inrockuptibles, as well as in Le Monde).11 In a few lines in his diary in 1994 (at that time it was to be published in April 2000, under the title, La Campagne de France), he had regretted that the radio programme, Panorama, on France-Culture was run by journalists who systematically proclaimed their Jewishness. He wrote: It annoys and saddens me to see and hear this experience [of France], this culture and this civilisation having as principal spokespersons and means of expression, in very many cases, a majority of Jewish people, very frequently rst or second generation French, who are not direct participants in this experience.
11 Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen in La Face cachée du Monde, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2003, devote pages 364 to 370 to this affair, in which, according to them, the chief editor of the newspaper played a leading role.
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The affair had a brief sequel in 2002, when Renaud Camus published a new book, Du sens, in which he discussed it. Patrick Kéchichian (Le Monde, 15 June 2002) saw therein the con rmation of the ‘disease’ affecting Camus: anti-Semitism. Similarly, Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote (Le Point, 21 June 2002), “One can be a good writer and an inveter- ate anti-Semite.” If anti-Semitism there be—and not only Renaud Camus, but also many intellectuals and journalists would challenge this—it must be admitted that it is fairly traditional, set in a context which recalls Barrès or Maurras. Its sources have nothing to do with Islam, the Israeli-Palestinian con ict, tendencies in the suburbs or the blunders of the extreme left, which we shall discuss a little later: the critics of Renaud Camus do tend to interpret him in terms of a virtu- ally outmoded nationalism. Other incidents, which have not received as much media attention, are evidence of vigilance with respect to any expression of traditional anti-Semitism in the press, on television, in the cinema or in books. In September 2004, the Centre régional de documentation pédagogique (CRDP) in Franche-Comté and the publishers, Fernand Nathan, decided to with- draw a school book entitled Enseigner le fait religieux, un dé pour la laïcité, with a preface by Régis Debray from sale. The latter said later that he had not read it, thus preferring to admit to having made a professional error rather than having to give any further support to dubious passages stating, for example, that Jews have an “almost paranoid tendency” to be sensitive to anti-Semitism or that “death in concentration camps enabled the portrayal of a Christ-like image of the destiny of the Jew- ish people which bears only a very distant and politically very dubious relation to true Judaism”. In 2001, the UEJF (Union des Étudiants Juifs de France) attacked the encyclopaedia, Quid. In the article on the concentration camps, after enumerating at length the statistical data emanating from the most outstanding historians who had worked on the Shoah, the authors quoted the revisionist thesis declaring that the number of Jewish victims in Auschwitz was 150,000 persons, “which, included approximately one hundred thousand Jews, most of whom died of typhus”.12 Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, published ‘simple crosswords’ in poor taste, where the answers were ‘genocide’ for ‘wholesale butch- ers’ or ‘youpine’ for a Jewish woman. Warned by the MRAP (Mouvement
12 At once, the editor decided to rectify this entry and, after a technical incident in 2002, the correction was made permanent in 2003.
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contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples), the newspaper apologised for ‘this regrettable tendency’ and declared its ‘intention to ght racism and anti-Semitism’. We could add the decision by the television channel TF1 to censor the anti-Semitic speeches in a lm about Hitler produced by a Canadian studio “which could have been misinterpreted”; or the polemics surrounding the release in France of Mel Gibson’s lm The Passion of the Christ which was accused of presenting the Jews as blood- thirsty deicides, and therefore of encouraging a somewhat archaic form of religious anti-Semitism—condemned by the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) but still alive in some sectors, in particular among fundamentalist Catholics. Moreover, the thesis of the ‘Shoah business’, which presents the Jews as being unashamedly money-grabbing, is a further extension of negationism, asserting that the ‘big lie of Auschwitz’ is an invention which enables the Jews to get rich. Defended by Norman Finkelstein in a book which is perhaps in dubious taste rather than blatantly anti-Semitic and translated from the American in 2001 under the title L’Industrie de l’Holocauste,13 this thesis is a link, or a sort of transition between the classic theme of the Jews’ relationship with money, updated by the negationists, and the radical challenging of the State of Israel, which is said to be at the centre of the operation aimed at extorting money from Europe for the bene t of its own policies.
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Media and the Courts
Today, what is really new is the way in which politics and the media have been rocked by recurrent scandals where questions posed by the State of Israel and by anti-Semitism have been con ated, subjecting various public gures to serious accusations, often quite excessively. Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, positions hostile to its existence could appear to be an expression of anti-Semitism. It is not always easy to draw a line between these two concepts. To criticise Ariel Sharon’s policies today does not imply a challenge to the principle of Zionism which, in the course of history, many Jews themselves have challenged. For example, some religious movements have done so,
13 Norman Finkelstein, L’Industrie de l’Holocauste. Ré exions sur l’exploitation de la souffrance des Juifs, Paris, La Fabrique, 2001 (2000).
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as did the socialist militants of the Bund from its foundation at the end of the 19th century until its annihilation under the combined effect of Nazism and Communism.14 To criticise Zionism is not necessarily to deny the Jews, as a people or as a nation, the right to have a state—but it may go as far as that and then enter the realm of anti-Semitism. We should add that Zionism may itself serve as a vehicle for a certain type of anti-Semitism by suggesting that the Jewish Diaspora should be wound up and all Jews sent to the Hebrew State. The fact remains that, since the end of the 1990s, the media has oscillated between expressions of opinions critical of Israel and accusa- tions of anti-Semitism as regards these criticisms. What is speci c to these accusations is that they all target public gures who are generally considered to be progressive and quite above any form of racism and that they are not always based on sound arguments. They appear in the media, but on occasion the courts are also brought in. In some cases, the controversy operates primarily on an intellectual or artistic or media level. Here are some examples. The group Sniper, after having sold two hundred thousand copies of their CD La France on which they sing “screw France [. . .] f*** the Republic”, made a new CD in 2003 on which they praised “those who throw stones” explaining that “blowing things up is a form of resistance”, and added, “Contradict the Zionists and in two seconds you’re taken for anti-Semitic.” They quoted Rim K (Karim), the lead singer of the 113 group: “I come from a municipal garbage truck, I don’t live like a Jew or like a Hollywood star” and when he was inter- viewed by the online newsletter Proche-Orient.info, which is always vigilant with this type of dossier, the singer explained, “I don’t live like a Jew or in Hollywood. . . . I don’t live like a star [. . .]. In France, Jews are labelled: they dress in Prada clothes. They go to tanning salons [. . .] I know lots of rebeus 15 who go to tanning salons [. . .] There’s nothing derogatory about what I’m saying. It’s not an insult.” This was not the sort of material which would constitute an ‘affair’ and the staff from Proche-Orient.info left it at that. The lm made by Eyal Sivan and Michel Khlei Route 181. Fragments d’un voyage en Israël-Palestine is a road movie, in which they interview
14 Cf. Henri Minczeles, Histoire du Bund. Un mouvement révolutionnaire juif, Paris, Denoël, 1999. 15 Translator’s note: ‘rebeus’—slang for second-generation North African born in France.
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people whom they meet along the line of partition stipulated by UN resolution number 181. “The aim of the trip,” wrote Serge Kaganski in Les Inrockuptibles (17 March 2004), “was to demonstrate that Israel is a genocidal state, a paranoid and racist society”. The lm had already been shown on Arte (24 November 2003) and had given rise to numer- ous protests at the time. The scandal broke when the organisers of the festival Cinéma du Réel at Beaubourg changed its screening. Faced with further protests and concerned about their ability to ensure security, they cancelled one of the two showings but screened the showing going ahead in a bigger theatre. Can this lm do other than incite anti-Semitic hatred, as its critics contend, anti-Semitism barely concealed behind its anti-Zionism? Or is it a demonstration of the illegitimacy of Israel coupled with a normal appeal to freedom of speech, including the freedom to criticise this state? A petition against censorship was signed, among others, by Jean-Luc Godard, the publisher Eric Hazan, François Maspero, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Rony Brauman, Mathieu Lindon, and Etienne Balibar—an intelligentsia which cannot be suspected of anti- Semitism, but which is both very critical of Israel and totally opposed to censorship. But where does criticism of the State of Israel end and anti-Semitism begin? This problem recurs so frequently, that, for example, legal action was taken against Sami Naïr, Danièle Sallenave and Edgar Morin for ‘racial defamation’ and ‘justi cation of terrorist acts’ after they published a column in Le Monde criticising the Israeli people for having become ‘domineering and over-con dent’, ‘disdainful and enjoying humiliating others’ and displaying a ‘dreadful inhumanity’. The associations Avocats sans frontières and France-Israël accused the authors of these remarks of a ‘semantic shift’ with the criticism of Israeli Jews being extended to Jews in general. For anyone who knows Morin’s background, work and posi- tions, labelling this sociologist as anti-Semitic is an out-and-out paradox, if not totally absurd. A petition was circulated to this effect. However, this did not put an end to the polemic. Edgar Morin returned to his analysis in a new column (Le Monde, 18 February 2004) and was more speci c in his criticism of Israel. Responding to the analysis, the journal- ist Sylvain Attal (4 March 2004) denounced his ‘intellectual treachery’ (‘trahison des clercs’)16 as well as the ‘monstrous idea’ that the Jews,
16 Translator’s note: The title of Julien Benda’s celebrated book, Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs, Paris, J.J. Pauvert, 1965 (1927).
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as a result of their own behaviour, were responsible for their rejection “while their attackers were able to take advantage of the excuse of the very real forms of discrimination from which they suffer”. The scandal, or its beginnings, sometimes originates in the publica- tion of a book. Hence, Israël Shamir’s L’Autre Visage d’Israël,17 includes statements such as “Jewry has taken control in the United States”, the Jews are “cunning people” and their “thirst for vengeance” is “stronger than their greed”. As soon as it came out in October 2003, and after its content had been reported by Proche-Orient.info, it was immediately withdrawn from sale by one of its co-editors, Balland, whose managing director apologised: he had not read the manuscript carefully. Con- versely, in L’Humanité (5 November 2003) Régine Deforges defended the author, “an Israeli citizen of Russian origin (who) attacks the present policies of the Sharon government and calls for the peaceful creation of an Israeli-Palestinian state”. Didier Daeninckx then protested on a website remarking that “the blue bicycle has gone off the rails” (Régine Deforges is the author of La Bicyclette Bleue). Other complaints were sent to L’Humanité which did not reply but withdrew Régine Deforges’ article from its website. Randa Ghazi’s book Rêver la Palestine18 is presented as a novel for young people. It tells how young Palestinians in Gaza ght Israeli sol- diers who, for their part, allegedly assassinate children and old people, rape women, desecrate mosques and break the bones of babies in cold blood. Is this anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic? The book does use the term ‘the Jews’ to refer to the Israelis. The CRIF protested. True, this book is not the only place in which the Israeli army is described in this way; for example, in an article by Sara Daniel in Le Nouvel Observateur (n° 1931, November 2001) we nd descriptions of the same ilk. The editorial committee would then endeavour to blot out the disastrous impact of such comments as: Palestinian women who have been raped by Israeli soldiers are systema- tically killed by their own families. Here rape has become a war crime because the Israeli soldiers know exactly what will happen. Another example is the case brought against the journalist Daniel Mermet, who was criticised for his editorial line on France-Inter; between 18 and 22 June 2001, in his broadcast Là-bas si j’y suis,
17 Paris, Co-edited by Balland/Blanche, 2003. 18 Paris, Flammarion, 2002.
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he gave the oor to listeners, some of whom were fervent anti-Zionists. The UEJF, the LICRA and Avocats sans frontières accused him of racial defamation and incitation to racial hatred (he was acquitted). He was accused of ‘not being impartial’ in his broadcast and of ‘empathy’ with terrorism. Amongst the witnesses, Roger Cukierman, the president of the CRIF, said Mermet was partly responsible for the current “wave of anti-Jewish acts”, Alain Finkielkraut accused him of describing Israelis as Jews, “victims who had become Nazis” and Rony Brauman, conversely, explained that Zionism “included an element of racism”. Commenting on the trial, the website legraindesable.com remarked that the extreme right had been condemned for less violent remarks and added, “It is not because one is on the side of progress that one has the right to be above the law.” The last issue or rather the last dossier which we shall refer to here is that of the comedian, Dieudonné, who, since 2002 at least, seems not to think twice about making very violent remarks about Jews. Invited to the Conférence Berryer (a speech contest for young lawyers), he declared that his electoral programme was “anti-Semitism, anti-white and pro-Bin Laden [. . .]. The Jews are a sect; it’s a con [. . .]. The Torah shields interests which are much darker than spiritual interests”.19 On 1 December 2003, during the television broadcast On ne peut pas plaire à tout le monde hosted by Marc-Olivier Fogiel, he appeared wearing a combat uniform and a black balaclava, over which was a hat and two sidelocks which could only evoke religious Jews. He claimed to be a “Zionist fundamentalist” who had converted to Judaism not “for political reasons but for profes- sional reasons, if you see what I mean”, and invited the young people from the deprived banlieue housing estates to “get their act together” and join up with “the axis of good. The American-Zionist axis”. He concluded his monologue with an IsraHeil! and, raising his arm in Nazi fashion, was applauded by the public. Another comedian on the stage, Jamel Debbouze, congratulated him, “I’ll be your minister whenever you want [. . .]. You’re the greatest.” Jamel Debbouze dissociated himself from Dieudonné in January 2005 after backing him on another occa- sion by shouting, “You are saying out loud what everyone really thinks” on the stage of the Zenith in Paris at a show during which Dieudonné invited the public to boo at the name of various Jewish public gures. “Since then, I’ve understood that you can’t laugh at everything with everyone” (Le Figaro, 11 February 2005). Dieudonné, whose show at
19 Quoted in Le Monde, 19 February 2002.
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the Olympia and then a tour outside Paris were to be cancelled, due to threats received by the organisers, returned to the charge on several occasions: he denounced the monopoly on suffering which the Jews bene ted from, according to him, whereas Blacks had had more than their share of suffering in history; he linked his hatred of the Jews with the problems of deprived banlieue areas, with social exclusion and with the racism of an oppressive society. A few months after the episode on television, he was one of the leading candidates on the Euro-Palestine list to stand at the European elections in May 2004, claiming to defend the Palestinian cause. The list included gures of such questionable leanings that Leila Shahid, who represents the Palestinian Authority in Paris, was anxious to publicly disown it. There are several lessons to be learnt from these various events. In the rst instance, they are evidence of the tremendous capacity of the intelligentsia to react to the slightest suspicion of anti-Semitism or, on the contrary, to the slightest attempt to restrict any criticism of Israeli policy. They indicate the spectacular presence of the Israeli-Palestinian con ict in public discussion, which has been reduced, in these incidents, to an ideological struggle where two camps constantly exchange blunders and exaggerations, possibly even degenerating into a form of anti- Semitism. It is sometimes dif cult to judge whether this anti-Semitism came rst, the father of such discourse, or whether it is the ultimate conclusion of criticism of Israeli policy. Thereafter, these events act as the driving force on two levels. One is at media level where opinions, positions and news shape the image of a public space constantly oscil- lating between over and underestimation; the risk being that remarks are either banalised or, on the contrary, over-dramatised. The other is at the level of justice, since the presumed anti-Semites are liable to be taken to court, particularly by Jewish associations. Here we see the emergence of an axis of opposition between two approaches: the rst invokes freedom of speech which is said to be threatened by those who are permanently on the lookout for anti-Semitism behind the slightest criticism of Israel; the second demands punishment for any expression of an anti-Semitism, however trivial, slight or veiled with humour, that anti-Zionism would only mask.20
20 Cf. for numerous illustrations, Bernard Fauvarque, “L’antisionisme au travers de la presse catholique” in the collective work, Nouveaux Visages de l’antisémitisme. Haine passion ou haine historique? Paris, NM7, 2001, pp. 267–278.
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A further characteristic of some of these issues is that they reveal serious shortcomings on the part of institutions and the media. The host of a primetime programme, during which someone could shout IsraHeil! to applause, did not react, or reacted badly and late; the organisers of the festival of the Cinéma du Réel did not know how to deal with the Route 181 incident: the people who were protesting against this lm were not necessarily requesting that the screening be cancelled, and, if some of them did suggest prohibiting it, it was a result of the blunders in the decisions or in the press communiqués of those in charge of the festival. Whenever the question of anti-Semitism arises the reaction of the media is always characterised by excesses or neglect. We have already seen a spectacular illustration of this recorded in this book. Journalists and the whole political class lost their heads, in July 2004, when a young woman claimed she had been attacked by six youths from a poor housing estate—some black, others North African—who, she said rst assaulted and robbed her, then beat her up because they thought she was Jewish. The story was an invention from start to nish as they would learn a few days later. The preceding remarks present the media as a stage on which various dramas are played out in which anti-Semitism—known or suspected— constitutes one of the major themes. This anti-Semitism has gained a new lease of life in comparison with the traditional discourse given the central nature of anti-Zionism. It should be noted here that some Catholic publications have also permitted an anti-Semitism in keeping with the current anti-Israeli sentiment to surface here and there.21 Are the media themselves not directly responsible for the spread of hatred of the Jews? Do they not sometimes tend, consciously or unconsciously, to encourage it or, at least, to be extremely indulgent towards it? There is no lack of analyses to support both these arguments. Some people criticise the way in which some of the media are either occasionally or systematically hostile to Israel, not hesitating to resort to lies, and never apologising for any errors made, even major ones. Agence France-Presse (AFP), for example, was accused by Paul Foster22 of ‘pandering to their considerable Arab clientele’ or of ‘false rumours’ and hence ‘disinforma- tion’.23 But what they say is often undermined by their exaggeration and
21 Cf. Bernard Fauvarque, op. cit. 22 Paul Foster, “L’odyssée des médias. Les médias français seraient-ils devenus antisémites?” in the collective publication Nouveau Visages de l’antisémitisme, op. cit., pp. 221–228. 23 Cf. also, in the same book, Clément Weill-Raynal “L’affaire du ‘Tunnel des mosquées’ vue par l’Agence France-Presse, AFP”, pp. 203–219, which says that the
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their unconditional defence of anything to do with Israel. Other people, or sometimes the same ones, demonstrate how the anti-Semitism which they criticise in the media is much more than a simple extension of identi cation with the Palestinian cause and open hostility to Israel. It is an opinion brimming with hatred towards the Jews which is tolerated and present, even if veiled to a greater or lesser extent. They then go on to accuse, not only the press of the extreme right and the Muslim radios, but also the television or even newspapers like Libération or Le Monde and radio stations like France-Inter, not to mention the press close to the extreme left like Le Monde diplomatique, for example. The lawyer, Gilles William Goldnadel, who gives examples in Le Nouveau Bréviaire de la haine,24 claims that this type of media can always be relied on to be quick to attack the racism or anti-Semitism of the extreme right, or ‘traditional’ anti-Semitism, but when the anti-Semitism originates ‘in Arab-Muslim circles or among left-wing extremists’ they can only be described as ‘passive’ or ‘complacent’.25 We should add here that the traditional media are restricted by laws and are controlled to a certain extent, even if, as we have just seen, blunders, or the beginnings thereof, are possible. On the other hand, over the past few years, the Internet has afforded an opportunity for a surge in anti-Jewish hatred which is much more dif cult for public authorities to counter. It provides anti-Semitism, along with many other forms of hate speech (anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism seems to mobilise Internet surfers much more than anti-Semitism)26 with novel
‘Agence France-Presse’ tacitly consented to broadcast far and wide the accusation of ‘Israeli plot’ [. . .] on the holy Muslim sites in Jerusalem. Millions of listeners and readers of the press were able to hear and read that “an odious crime had been perpetrated in Jerusalem” [. . .]. There was a move from Israeli plot to a ‘Zionist plot’ aimed at converting Jerusalem to Judaism. A tunnel had been dug ‘secretly’, ‘overnight’ under the mosque. An action “rejected by all religions because it represents a agrant attack against the house of God” [. . .], “one of the most heinous sins” [. . .], “intense provo- cation against the Christian and Muslim holy sites” [. . .] Violent and perhaps sincere reactions reported by Agence France-Presse, to an imaginary crime . . . invented by the self-same Agency”, pp. 218–219. 24 Gilles William Goldnadel, Le Nouveau Bréviaire de la haine, Paris, Ramsay, 2001. 25 Idem, p. 21. 26 A CNCDH Report (Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme) quoted by Le Monde, 17 June 2004 reports on a study of over one million articles published on the Net between 1993 and 2004 by 334 racist francophone forums. The insult ‘bougnoule’ is found in 6,210 messages and ‘youpin’ or ‘yid’ in 4,739 messages;
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ways of spreading their message. They disseminate it via networks and loops—and it is possible for a small group, even a single person, to be the driving force behind a powerful ideology. Here we have a new ele- ment, which involves the proliferation of all sorts of anti-Semitic sites but which is also set in the context, to which we shall return later, of the globalisation of anti-Semitism since, via the Internet, the dissemi- nation of hate speech operates at international level, no matter where it is produced.
The Tariq Ramadan Affair
In October 2003, the oumma.com website published a text by Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim preacher, who is especially active in France where he has a large following, particularly amongst the most highly educated Muslim young people. Apparently the article had been refused by the editorial boards of Libération and Le Monde. He accused the “French Jewish intellectuals, who until then had always been considered as universalist thinkers,” of having begun to “develop analyses which were increasingly in uenced by a tendency to be community oriented, tending to relativise the defence of the universal principles of equality or justice”. He quoted Pierre-André Taguieff, Alain Finkielkraut, Alex- andre Adler, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksman and Bernard-Henri Lévy whose analyses were said to support Ariel Sharon, and stated that, “We are witnessing the emergence of a new attitude amongst certain intellectuals who are everywhere in the media”. Their “retreat into identity politics” was said to be a political positioning which “was a response to community rationales, as Jews, or nationalists, as defenders of Israel”. This document was to assume considerable importance. It was distrib- uted by the European Social Forum (ESF) on the eve of its November 2003 meeting, a huge alterglobalist rally which was the focus of all media attention. This indicated a rapprochement between this protest movement and various Muslim organisations based on their hostility
22% of the texts target the Arab-Muslim category with only approximately 10% targeting Jews.
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to the United States, a strong identi cation with the Palestinians and a rejection of the traditional left whose former secretary of the Parti socialiste, Lionel Jospin, then Prime Minister, had described Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. The alterglobalisation movement was desta- bilised. Tariq Ramadan’s supporters had to respond to intense internal criticism, such as that of Jacques Nikonoff, president of ATTAC, who protested at “manipulation” aimed at “creating problems within the alterglobalisation movement”. Pierre Khalfa was more cautious, describ- ing Tariq Ramadan’s text not as anti-Semitic but “characterised by a community-oriented perspective”. It is true that a few months earlier, in Berlin, during a preparatory meeting for the same forum, some young members of the Hachomer Hatzaïr, a movement of left-wing Zionist Jews, had withdrawn from the organisation after having requested in vain the prohibition of a T-shirt on which was printed, “The world stopped Nazism. The world stopped apartheid. The world will stop Zionism”. Outside the alterglobalisation movement, members of the Parti socialiste (like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Vincent Peillon and Manuel Valls) questioned their participation in the forum given that it welcomed Tariq Ramadan. Among them, Malek Boutih said that he “did not understand the presence of Ramadan” at the forum. At the same time, the Trotskyists from the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) refused to see the slightest anti-Semitism in Tariq Ramadan’s article and one of the leaders of the Verts, Noël Mamère, considered the criticisms aimed at Tariq Ramadan as a “means of destabilising the ESF”. Tariq Ramadan’s text was effectively anti-Semitic since there was essentialism in his treatment of his targets rather than his text being limited to a discussion of ideas. So much so that some of the intellec- tuals referred to as Jews may not have been Jewish at all. It shook the left and the extreme left. Some of their leaders thought along the same lines; others were up in arms. It is a good illustration of how legitimate criticism of Israeli policy can become distorted and veer towards anti- Semitism. But it had another effect: it had somehow allowed a Muslim intellectual to break into the media at the highest level. Le Monde was well aware of this, putting Tariq Ramadan on the front page with banner headlines announcing a pro le of him. Ramadan himself had succeeded in rising to the same level as the most famous of the ‘media’ intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Lévy. He was positively jubilant in the article he wrote in reply which was published in Le Point (n° 1622, 17 October 2003):
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No, Mr Lévy, I am not an imam. I can understand it is dif cult for you to treat me as an equal (after all, you have been accustomed to taking a paternalist attitude which apparently gave you the right to think on behalf of the ‘jeunes beurs’27 for such a long time) . . . Similarly, on 14 November 2003, at the European Social Forum, he said: One does not reply to a person who writes books [he is referring to himself ] by cobbling together something worthy of the banlieue press [he is referring to Bernard-Henri Lévy] . . . well, I have nothing against the banlieue press. . . . What I meant to say was the society press. He also declared that he had always condemned anti-Semitism. There- after there were more criticisms and also more expressions of support together with a brief televised debate with Nicolas Sarkozy, the Min- ister of the Interior. Tariq Ramadan, with his text and its shocking content, marked the arrival of a new set of players on the intellectual media scene who challenge the French version of universalism which prevailed until then. If we consider the intellectual argument alone, Tariq Ramadan con- structed his intervention around the theme of the classical opposition between universalism and particularism. He argued that the Jewish intellectuals who in the past had identi ed most closely with universal- ism had now switched to particularism. But two of his main targets, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy do not occupy exactly the same position and it may be useful to explain where they differ. Alain Finkielkraut is indeed primarily an incarnation of the republican form of universalism, which wants to see in the public sphere only individuals who are free and equal before the law. The weakness of his republican leanings is that they come on top of Finkielkraut’s rather high pro le as a Jewish intellectual who is listened to and admired in the Jewish community, with the result that he has a dif cult balancing act to per- form between rigorous Republicanism and the af rmation of a speci c identity. Bernard-Henri Lévy primarily personi es the universalism of human rights and is not particularly associated with any sort of ‘Republicanism’. While he is respected amongst the Jewish commu- nity, he is less of a charismatic gure than Finkielkraut. Furthermore,
27 Translator’s note: ‘beur’ is a second-generation North African born in France.
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the accusation that he unconditionally supports Israeli policy, including that of Sharon, is totally unfounded. Tariq Ramadan’s accusation hits the model represented by Finkiel- kraut—the intellectual performing a balancing act—harder than the model represented by Lévy, which, is ultimately more traditional. But, in any event, it is an indication of a change in the tenor of the debate in France which, with gures like Ramadan,28 will be less and less able to make do with the universal alone and will be forced more and more to open up to cultural differences. There is a heavy price to pay for opening up: the way in which it was achieved is open to question, given that it allowed anti-Semitic remarks.
On the Left and the Extreme Left
Modern anti-Semitism is not the monopoly of the radical and nationalist right. It also has a long history on the left. Hence we can go back to the Enlightenment and Voltaire; look to Camille Desmoulins or Marat29 during the French Revolution; then consider some of the writings of Karl Marx, Fourier or Proudhon.30 More recently, communist parties and regimes have proved actively anti-Semitic with Jews personifying money, capitalism and even American imperialism but also, in some cases, unfair competition for ‘national’31 executives. In Central Europe under Soviet domination and where purges had almost eliminated the last Jews, we have even witnessed ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ in the words of the journalist Paul Lendvaï,32 possibly used as a tool by the authorities. Communist parties and regimes have not always been hostile to the State of Israel. For a time, Joseph Stalin supported Israel, most probably to counter the British in uence in the Middle East. But, on the whole communist parties and regimes have tended
28 Cf. also on Tariq Ramadan, Gilles Képel, Fitna, guerre au cœur de l’islam, Paris, Gallimard, 2004. 29 Cf. for example Arthur Hertzberg, Les Origines de l’antisémitisme moderne, Paris, Presses de la Renaissance, 2004 (1968). 30 Cf. for Karl Marx in particular, “On the Jewish question” published for the rst time in the Annales franco-allemandes in 1844. 31 Cf. for example, in relation to Poland, Michel Wieviorka, Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarnosc, Paris, Denoël, 1984. 32 Paul Lendvaï, L’Antisémitisme sans Juifs, Paris, Fayard, 1971.
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to demonstrate an anti-Zionism which has sometimes degenerated into anti-Semitism or become mixed up with it. There is therefore nothing new about the fact that anti-Semitism has been able to work its way into the left and the extreme left, and not only onto the other side of the political chessboard. In France today, it is clear from the Israel-Palestine con ict that such an observation must be made without excluding other geopoliti- cal aspects which, then, refer more widely to a critique of American imperialism and to possible ideological backing for various regimes in the Arab-Muslim world. Once again, various affairs or polemics offer insight into, if not the reality of anti-Semitism, at least the problems which simply suspecting it can arouse. Some of these originate in current events, and involve radical political stances including anti-capitalism, anti-neoliberalism, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli and anti-American positions occasionally extending into expressions of anti-Semitism of varying degrees. There have been several instances of this in the Parti socialiste where tensions have often run high in this area. Thus, in April 2001, Pascal Boniface, a member of the party and a specialist in international relations, direc- tor of the Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques (IRIS), sent a memorandum which he had written on the Israeli-Palestinian con ict to the rst secretary of the Parti socialiste, François Hollande, and to the international secretary, Henri Nallet. In it he sharply criticised the policy of the State of Israel and its breaches of international law. He observed that supporting this State despite everything could become counter-productive for the Parti socialiste: I am struck [. . .] by how things have progressed amongst young people, particularly students, who were very split on the subject of the Middle East twenty years ago and are today massively pro-Palestinian [. . .]. By relying on its electoral weight to ensure the impunity of the Israeli government, the Jewish community may be the loser in the not too distant future. The Muslim community, and/or those of Muslim descent, who are also becoming organised, will wish to counteract this and, at least in France, will weigh heavily in the balance, if this is not already the case [. . .] I am struck by the number of young “beurs” and of French Muslims of all ages who say they are on the left but who, because of the situation in the Middle East, state that they do not wish to vote for Jospin in the presidential elections. The memorandum was distributed and a very bitter polemic ensued, in the columns of Le Monde in particular where an article by Pascal Boniface
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carried considerable weight. Accused of attacking the French Jewish community, Boniface wrote in a book which was later published: Anything I had said which could be considered compatible with the interests of Israel had been erased, as if I had to be demonised at any price, as if it had to be proved to the reader at any price that the Jews only have implacable enemies who tar them all with the same brush.33 He was mainly accused of having attempted to bring pressure to bear on the Parti socialiste to endeavour to secure the votes of the popula- tion of Arab-Muslim origin by distancing it from Israel, even if that meant losing votes in the Jewish community, which was much smaller. He was then accused of identity politics—quite simply of giving preference to the Arab or Muslim community rather than the Jewish community. And within the Parti socialiste some party of cials went as far as blaming him for the defeat of Lionel Jospin at the presidential elections in April 2002. “Le Pen should thank Pascal Boniface,” were the words of a Parti socialiste leader in the Val-de-Marne at the time in a circular in which he explained that Jospin lost the Jewish vote as a result of the positions defended by Pascal Boniface. Later, within the Parti socialiste remarks could be heard or attitudes observed reasserting, or even stiffening, the position of Boniface. For example, Kader Arif ( rst federal secretary of the Parti socialiste in Haute Garonne) boycotted the dinner given by the Midi-Pyrénées CRIF ( January 2004). In an open letter ( June 2003), Frédérique Sprang asked, “How much longer are these pro-Israeli organisations going to continue to intimidate all those in France who criticise the policy carried out by Ariel Sharon in the occupied territories, by accusing them of anti-Semitism?” It is unfair to accuse Pascal Boniface of anti-Semitism, unless any criticism of Israel is to be taken as proof of hatred towards the Jews in general. But there was no shortage of accusations and, most importantly here, these accusations had considerable in uence within the Parti sociali- ste. Does this mean that the party is resolved to distance itself from any criticism of Israel which is too trenchant? The answer is not so simple. For we also have an example of someone at the centre of a controversy in the Parti socialiste for the opposite reason. One of its elected members,
33 Pascal Boniface, Est-il permis de critiquer Israël?, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003, p. 207.
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François Zimeray, who, along with others, had launched a petition of 170 members of the European Parliament, requested a committee of inquiry into the use of the European funds allocated by the European Community to the Palestinian Authority and denounced the way the Palestinian school textbooks spoke about Jews. François Zimeray had also been behind the decision of the publisher, Delagrave, to withdraw a book for technical school students (CAP) which included somewhat dubious passages and, in particular, an exercise in which an unjusti ed link was suggested between the Jews in general and the Israel-Palestine con ict. Ostracised by his local section, excluded from the Socialist list for the European elections, Zimeray was accused in February 2003, in a letter from the Socialist president of the Upper-Normandy region “of transposing an exceedingly complex con ict [. . .] Your electoral mandate imposes on you a genuine respect for positions which have been taken collectively. You have involved us against our will”. The Parti socialiste is in no way open to anti-Semitism. However, it is regularly taken to task by those who would like it to adopt positions more distinctly favourable to the state of Israel and its policies, as well as by those who, on the contrary, would like to see it clearly distanc- ing itself from them. It is under pressure. The Parti communiste (PC) is in a slightly different situation. Its leaders support the idea of the coexistence of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, but among the rank and le, anti-American sentiment inherited from the Cold War period is powerful and is prolonged by an anti-Zionism which sees in Israel a bridgehead of the United States. However, it is not really within the PC that we observe the most radical tendencies to move from criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism. With the Verts, pro-Palestinian positions can drift towards attitudes or remarks which, while not anti-Semitic, do provide anti-Semitism with a sort of support or political legitimacy. Their spokesperson in Paris, Aurélie Filippetti made a speech expressing her anger after the demon- stration against the war in Iraq on 22 March 2003—a demonstration during which slogans hostile to Jews, and not only to Israel, were heard and during which young left-wing Zionists were attacked. She explained in Libération (29–30 March 2003) that “when an Israeli ag is burnt, it is not Sharon’s policy which is being condemned but the very existence of a Jewish state. It is therefore anti-Semitism and not anti-Zionism”. She said she would like her party to be both clearly pro-Palestinian and
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Zionist. But, she remarked, “The word “Zionist” triggered a hue and cry. I was called a colonialist, a revisionist . . .”.34 Her account of the internal discussions within the Verts is evidence of a mass refusal on the part of militants and party of cials to accept ‘Zionism’—the existence, in fact, of the State of Israel. Alain Lipietz retorted, “You are insulting my family because, when they came out of the camps, they refused to go to Israel”; Yves Contassot told her that she had no business discussing the dossier because she knew nothing about it; Patrick Farbiaz, “who is pro-Palestinian through and through, lost his temper and ended up saying, “Anyway, you are not even Jewish, what has it got to do with you? I am Jewish—I know what it’s about, whereas you—you can have nothing to say in the matter”. She commented, “We were going round in circles. They refused to go to the nub of the debate: recognising the speci city of anti-Semitism in France”. In fact, the Verts are divided. There is a ‘left wing’ whose radical, intransigent anti-Zionism can pave the way to an anti-Semitism, which follows in its wake under the cover of a political party which is not in itself anti-Semitic. There are also “young bloods” who, like Aurélie Filippetti, oppose anti-Israeli hyperbole and the risks of distortion which they lay open. But, in public life, it tends to be the left of the Verts which is in control. After Aurelie Filippetti’s intervention in favour of the two ags, Israeli and Palestinian, during the next demonstration against the war in Iraq, she recounted that the Verts, at national level decided that there would be no ags in their procession [. . .]. But, in the demonstration on 29 March, there were Palestinian ags everywhere, as well as Iraqi ags, photos of Saddam Hussein and anti-Semitic slogans. And what had been at issue in the protests against the war in Iraq came up again in other circumstances, for example during the European Social Forum (November 2003) where the Verts, on the whole, tended to be in favour of Tariq Ramadan’s presence, or else when Gilles Lemaire, their national secretary, got up and left the dinner given by the CRIF after its president, Roger Cukierman, denounced the existence of a ‘red-brown-green’ anti-Semitic alliance. Lemaire later explained that, “Today Israel exists. We are not challenging its legitimacy. On the other hand, the necessity of it is another question”.35
34 Interview published in L’Arche, n° 546–547, August-September 2003. 35 Interview published in Tohu Bohu, May-June 2003.
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On the extreme left, the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian positions are clear and close to those which have just been described with reference to those on the left of the Verts. There is no explicit anti-Semitism there, but instead a political radicalism so intransigent towards Israel that it has no counterpart when it comes to other states or regimes, however brutal or dictatorial, including in the Middle East. As this situation does, in some cases, lead extreme left organisations to make misguided alli- ances, in particular with various forms of Islam of varying degrees of extremity, it also brings them closer to anti-Semitic discourse or attitudes. But it is not amongst the established extreme left—that of the Ligue com- muniste révolutionnaire (LCR) or the Parti des travailleurs (PT ) or Lutte ouvrière (LO)—that we are likely to nd what are the true foundations of the anti-Semitism linked to absolute anti-Zionism, that is, negationism. This manifests itself explicitly elsewhere, in small, extreme or very marginal groups and still more in infrapolitical networks on the Web. One point is worth emphasising here: amongst the most radical pro- Palestinian militants, in the Verts, in some alterglobalist movements, as well as in the extreme left, there are some people who are not only Jewish but who explicitly assert a Jewish identity or origin which they proclaim as a sort of further proof of the legitimacy of their position. They lend a singular emphasis to the radical anti-Zionism which they promote, appearing to guarantee by their very presence that it cannot involve any anti-Semitism. Now these people are brought into close contact with more or less veiled expressions of hatred for Jews on the back of trends from within their organisations, amongst their allies or during certain events when it springs from their own ranks or those who identify with them. Does their position express a desire to dissolve their origins or their af liations in the melting pot of universal values? A desire for an action which would extend to ghting more systematically than anyone else those who personify the identity which they reject, or even any similar type of identity, beginning with the very form of the nation state?36 Or should we see here the ideological legacy of mili- tants who, Jewish or not, learned their politics in the 1960s or 1970s?
36 For an example of an argument which attributes a form of self-hatred to Jews, cf. Shmuel Trigano, La demission de la République. Juifs et musulmans en France, Paris, PUF, 2003, p. 80 in relation to the ‘Israelites’ of the 19th century: “Accusing one’s own people helps them to give themselves the illusion of lessening the burden of anguish, by letting themselves believe that there is some truth in the accusation made against their group and therefore that the hostility towards them is not as mysterious and irrational as it appears to be.”
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This hypothesis stresses, if not May ’68, at least the leftism of the 1970s as the prism through which extreme left militants would interpret the world, their identi cation in particular with the Palestinian cause appar- ently enabling them to continue their erstwhile campaigns, linked with the war in Vietnam and anti-colonialism. From this point of view, Israel is a brutal, colonial even racist state in its dealings with the people which it oppresses. It personi es the worst and calls for denunciation which, surprisingly, is not extended to other regimes which are nevertheless obviously much more obnoxious: From the Viet Minh to the Viet Cong, from the Algerian FLN to the Vietnamese FLN, the symbolic sharing of representations of good and evil tolerated no nuances. Any alliance was justi ed against the main imperia- list enemy of which Zionism was the ultimate form [. . .] the role devolved to Israel was that of Nazi Germany in these substitution games.37 We ought to remember that it was in November 1975 that the General Assembly of the United Nations voted by a large majority—made up, in particular, of Arab States, countries from the Soviet bloc and African states—resolution 3379 which likened Zionism to a form of racism. The result of this resolution was to encourage third-world or anti-American thinking to the point of view that an anti-Israeli position was legitimate. The most tenacious in the criticism of pro-Palestinian ‘leftism’ usually make a close association between the crystallisation of the anti-Zionist positions which they observe and anti-Semitism. As lawyer Goldnadel wrote: There is nothing to justify the opprobrium to which it (the State of Israel) is subjected,—not only is it exceptional, it is totally unique—nothing, except anti-Semitism. Of all the nation-states, the Jewish state is the most condemned, the most racist, the most sexist, the greatest threat to the environment and archaeology, the least respectful of liberties. It is the state which poses the greatest threat to world peace, the terrorist state par excellence, the state which is the greatest enemy of human rights [. . .]—these superlatives on all fronts, this literally infernal disproportion, this obsessive focus, this non-Jewish Israeli centrism are indeed the stamp of the devil.38
37 Jacques Tarnero, “Une maladie de l’âme”, in Nouveaux Visages de l’antisémitisme. Haine-passion ou haine historique, op. cit., pp. 245–266. 38 Gilles William Goldnadel, op. cit., pp. 117–118.
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Here anti-Semitism is to be found in the xation with Israel while there are many other problems and many other causes to which passions and ideologies could and should attach themselves. There is indeed something troubling here. We should add that, since the 1980s, the rise of Islam and Islamism has been forcing the heirs of post-68 leftism to compromise with play- ers who shape phenomena which are no longer national but politico- religious (like the Palestinian cause or even the Arab cause). Today, the anti-Semitism which may perpetuate an anti-Zionism based on identi cation with the Palestinian cause—when it does not predate it—is not the only phenomenon at issue. When it adds momentum to a possibly warlike and terrorist militant Islamism, it poses a new challenge to extreme left militants and organisations or comparable groups.
WIEVIORKA_f5_23-47.indd 47 7/30/2007 9:29:20 PM CHAPTER FOUR
THE SHOAH: DEFICIT, PLETHORA AND LOSS OF MEANING
If there is currently an upsurge or renewal of anti-Semitism, is this not primarily because some defences have been breached and because what could have protected the Jews ten or 20 years ago is now proving to be much less ef cient? Such a hypothesis can be expressed in speci c terms as follows: must we acknowledge that the memory of the Shoah, after having taken some time to penetrate the collective consciousness has now entered a phase of decline or a period in which it is open to challenge? In the French consciousness and collective memory, the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis is perceived today as a fact which nobody would deny, except those misguided, particularly ignorant or wicked souls, the negationists. However, we should not deduce from this general comment that this has always been the case since the end of World War II; nor should we imagine that this is something which will be obvious for all time, or even central to the image which French society has of itself, its history and its past. On the contrary: the Shoah, as a historical fact, follows a speci c trajectory. To begin with, it was marginalised or repressed, even by historians; it then attracted atten- tion and exerted considerable in uence before weakening and entering the present period where various challenges to its authenticity either banalise or relativise it.
De cit of Meaning
At the end of World War II, the systematic destruction of the Jews did not have the standing in public discussion that it was later able to have. It is worth taking a transnational approach to the question by considering two other experiences, besides the French experience, of which the impact on our country in this respect has been considerable: namely that of the United States and Israel.
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In the United States, as Peter Novick has recalled in his important book, The Holocaust in American Life, the Shoah rst appeared as merely one aspect of a war which had comprised many other aspects. Until the end of the 1950s it did not loom large in public debate and was not even a major concern in the public discourse of American Jews. All sorts of reasons have been advanced to account for this inhibi- tion and Novick proposes a particularly rich list. The Holocaust, as he points out, as we understand it today, was not what stood out at the time because Nazi barbarism was directed against many other peoples beside the Jews, who were not its only victims. The survivors were not the focus of attention they are today; our image of them was predominantly negative, even if their fate did arouse sympathy; their stories often bored people. The far-reaching geopolitical changes of the time had a considerable impact. The Cold War meant that the images of atrocities associated with Nazism were transferred to a new, Soviet, enemy and both the Nazi and Soviet regimes were yoked together in a common denunciation of totalitarianism, which weakened the percep- tion of the speci city of Nazism—which, of course, resided primarily in the destruction of the Jews. The Cold War had the effect of “mar- ginalizing the Holocaust . . . it was the displaced victims of Stalin, not of Hitler, who were fashionable . . .”1 As Novick says, “the Holocaust was historicized”, (it had not yet), “attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons”2—unlike Hiroshima which “had a much greater impact on Americans”.3 American Jews had the same con dence in American society as the Americans had at the time; they felt they were integrated; they were no longer a foreign element and in these circumstances were: not going to be inclined to center the Holocaust in their consciousness [. . .] The upbeat and universalist postwar mood not only muted discussions of the Holocaust, it colored what discussion there was.4 In other words, at this point in time, the Jews in the United States were endeavouring to think of their experience in positive terms,
1 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mif in Co., 1999, page 110. 2 Novick, op. cit., pages 88–89. 3 Id., p. 110. 4 Id., p. 114.
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including that of World War II, as witnessed by the huge success at the time of the Diary of Anne Frank and its adaptations for stage and screen which focussed on the optimism and ‘universalism’ of Anne in contrast to the interpretations given 30 or 40 years later. Nor were the years of the construction of Israel a period during which the Holocaust was particularly prominent. Early on, during World War II, the destruction of the European Jews was not the major issue which it was to become much later. This, in any event, is the argu- ment—hotly debated, to be sure—used by the ‘new Israeli historians’ who, like Tom Segev,5 consider, for example, that information about local or regional conditions during the years preceding the creation of the Hebrew State often carried more weight than information about the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis. Furthermore, recent discus- sions amongst Israeli historians have focussed on the hypothesis of a disjunction between the birth of Israel and the awareness of what the Holocaust was; this runs contrary to the current idea according to which Israel is the outcome of the guilt and stupefaction of nations all over the world on discovering the extent of Nazi barbarism towards the Jews.6 An equally controversial issue today, in particular amongst Israeli historians, is what Segev has referred to as the ‘denial of the Diaspora’. Were the future leaders of Israel and the Zionists in general more con- cerned during the war about the making of the state than about the Jews in Europe who were being destroyed? Were they, as Tuvia Friling contests, for example, not capable of rising to “the challenge which the Shoah represented for them at both theoretical and practical level”?7 Did they abandon the European Jews to their fate? Did they not, on the contrary, do everything in their power to save them? Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that the rst years of the State of Israel were not dominated by the theme, or the cult, of the memory of the Shoah which was to be established later. In France, the Jews who survived the camps often wanted to talk about their experiences. As Annette Wieviorka has shown,8 and contrary to
5 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York, Hill and Wang, 1993. 6 Cf. Peter Novick, op. cit., p. 71. 7 Tuvia Friling, “David Ben Gourion et la Shoah. Racines et évolutions d’un sté- réotype négatif ”, Critique du postsionisme, “Réponse aux nouveaux historiens”, T. Friling, ed. Editions In Press, 2004, p. 490. 8 Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et Génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli, Paris, Plon, 1992.
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Michael Pollak’s9 general thesis, this experience was not indescribable. However, any reference to it—with its speci cally anti-Jewish hostil- ity—met with refusal or a total incapacity to listen and to hear. At the time, when they were being subjected to the humiliation in icted by the torturers in the camps, some Jewish prisoners, like Simone Weil who has discussed this,10 had the feeling that they were despised by the other prisoners because they were Jewish. There were also occasions when they discovered, when the camps were liberated, that their lives were less important, in the eyes of the liberators, than those of the political prisoners or members of the Resistance. Their lives thereafter proved particularly harrowing. Total disbelief hung over any talk of the destruction of the Jews to the point of sti ing it, as did the stigmatis- ing attitude of those who implied that survival was shameful and even the reproach—why had they not rebelled? Very recent history (that of collaboration) also had an impact, as did the political situation with Communists and Gaullists uniting in a cult of the Resistance, leaving little room for the evocation of a drama speci c to the Jews alone. Moreover, the Jews themselves were more interested in participating in the reconstruction which was taking place in a climate of relative con dence in and optimism about the future. They wanted to be an integral part of French style universalism, or became involved in politi- cal campaigns in which there was no cause to proclaim their speci city. The particularly idealistic Jews who chose to return to the European countries under Soviet rule, especially to Poland, to build a true socialism represented an extreme case. Sooner or later most became disillusioned, often, moreover, as a result of anti-Semitic campaigns. Hence, the years 1945–1967 were, as Jean-Michel Chaumont11 wrote, the years of the ‘period of shame’, of eclipsing the speci cally anti- Semitic nature of Nazi barbarism, the accusation of passivity which likened the Jews, rounded up and taken to camps, to sheep being led to the slaughter and culminated in blaming them for what had hap- pened to them. For a more precise picture, we would have to take examples from other countries and participate in discussions about the ‘passivity’ of
9 Michael Pollak, L’Expérience concentrationnaire. Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale, Paris, A-M.Métailié, 1990. 10 Cf. for example Maurice Szafran, Simone Veil. Destin, Paris, Flammarion, 1994. 11 Jean-Michel Chaumont, La Concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance, Paris, La Découverte, 1997.
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the Jews in particular, or take part in the discussions on Israeli histo- riography. But we have said enough to enable us to make an initial observation: for twenty years after the war, there was no mention in France either of the ‘Holocaust’ or of the ‘Shoah’. The term ‘Holo- caust’ only emerged in the United States towards the end of the 1970s, before it met with a degree of success in Western Europe, while the word ‘Shoah’ only really became widespread in France in the 1980s with Claude Lanzmann’s lm of this title. In the western world, anti- Semitism seemed to be doomed by its own excesses, associated with Nazism, while at the same time there seemed to be a kind of de cit of meaning in anything to do with the Jewish experience outside Israel, and in particular of anything which might refer to the systematic destruction implemented by Hitler. This de cit was to last until the 1960s.
Plethora of Meanings
At this point, however, everything does change, and perhaps rst in terms of events in the Middle East and more precisely in Israel. Two facts of prime importance in Israel were to have an impact throughout the world in conferring meaning on what the Nazi enterprise of the destruction of the European Jews actually involved. In 1961, the leader of the Israeli government, Ben Gurion, announced to the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, that Adolf Eichmann had been arrested and his forthcoming trial would take place in Jerusalem. The man who had been amongst those in charge of the implementation of the nal solution had been discovered, arrested and secretly trans- ported from Argentina to Israel by the Israeli secret services. He was tried by Jewish judges, before a press which had come from all over the world—including the philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial for The New Yorker.12 Countless testimonies were solicited; in Annette Wieviorka’s13 words, the age of the witness was born. The event demonstrated that the Jews now had a state capable of ensuring justice even if, as far as Argentina was concerned, it meant ignoring international law. Israel was holding a trial where the international
12 She published an important book on the basis of her reporting, Eichmann in Jeru- salem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York, Viking Press, (1963). 13 Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin, Paris, Plon, 1998.
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community, by leaving Eichmann free and unpunished, had failed for over fteen years and this trial was followed with enthusiasm in Israel. But it also went much further than the trial of Eichmann alone; it afforded an opportunity to discuss the destruction of the European Jews and the death camps, and to put an end to the inhibition or repression, while at the same time recognising that Israel enabled the Jews to join a negative identity—that of a group of people who were the victims of a policy of destruction—with a proud, positive identity—that of a community capable of acting in a free and responsible manner. Five years later in 1967, the Israeli Army won a lightning war, the so-called Six Day War, against a coalition of Arab countries who were preparing to attack Israel. Feelings ran high throughout the world. The Israeli success put an end to the image of the Jew incapable of defending himself or even the image of the frightened Jew. It also forced international opinion to confront the possibility of an Israeli defeat, which would have brought the existence of the Hebrew State to a dramatic end—according to the Arab leaders, the intention was “to throw the Jews into the sea”. Many Jews in the Diaspora, who, until then, had been indifferent or even hostile to the construction of this state, adopted positive feelings towards it. Against the background of the alarm after the event and of Jewish pride, the voice of the Jews in the Diaspora was liberated and made itself heard: the death camps and the terrible years of World War II were revisited; the cinema, lit- erature and history took up the subject from this angle. The Six Day War widened the breach opened by the Eichmann trial and gave the Shoah meaning. In the United States, having given rise to various criticisms, in par- ticular of the conduct of the Israeli agents in Argentina, the trial of Adolf Eichmann afforded an opportunity to offer up for public debate the theme and even the word, Holocaust, the English translation of the Hebrew word, Shoah, suggested by the Israelis themselves. The destruc- tion of the European Jews was thus beginning to acquire speci city in the general view of Nazism. The showing of the play, The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth on Broadway in 1964 at the time when Vatican II was drawing to a close in Rome, created a scandal, because it described how Pope Pius XII, when confronted with Nazism, had chosen to promote the interests of the Catholic Church rather than concerning himself with the fate of the Jews. We have to follow Peter Novick here when he states that, “The Eichmann trial, along with the controversies over
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Arendt’s book and Hochhuth’s play, effectively broke fteen years of near silence on the Holocaust in American public discourse.”14 From then on, there was a ‘reversal of values’, in the words of Jean- Michel Chaumont, whereby the Holocaust was not only understood and perceived as a phenomenon in all its dimensions, but whereby American Jews, under the guidance of Elie Wiesel, declared the uniqueness of the genocide of the Jews and made of it something to be proud of and no longer a source of shame. Jean Michel Chaumont has recounted how a few weeks before the Six Day War a symposium which brought together four important Jewish public gures (Emil Fackenheim, Rich- ard H. Popkin, George Steiner and Elie Wiesel) marked a milestone. There they discussed the Shoah as “a glorious chapter in our eternal history”, and stressed its uniqueness and singularity: in short, American Jews and a considerable proportion of American public opinion had made the transition—henceforth the Shoah had become meaningful in the United States. The impact of the Six Day War was consider- able: it brought the United States and Israel closer together while at the same time reinforcing awareness of the extent and speci city of the Holocaust. In France, the events referred to above (the Eichmann trial, the Six Day War) were to have the same effects as in the United States. But the change, which was identical in nature, with public opinion focussing on the Shoah, was also based on other factors. Some were demographic: with decolonisation, many Jews had just come from North Africa. They were Sephardic Jews who brought with them not only the vitality of their community and a greater observance of religious practices, but also sensitivities which differed from those of the Jews in France, most of whom are of Ashkenazi origin who emigrated from Central Europe before World War II—they are survivors. The North African Jews are attached to the State of Israel and have little knowledge of the power- ful Jewish political non-Zionist or anti-Zionist movements in Europe, such as the Bund; they are less Republican in outlook and more likely to have a visible presence in the public sphere. They remember the violence to which they may have been subjected in the past, but have not been confronted directly with the Shoah. Furthermore, at the end of the 1960s, France entered into a more general phase of doubt, questioning the universalistic notions of progress and reason as they
14 Peter Novick, op. cit., p. 144.
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had been forged by the Enlightenment, the Republican idea or ideolo- gies of the communist type. The arrival of the Holocaust on the scene was facilitated, and also co-produced, by the rise of more widespread sensitivities, which called for the recognition of speci cities, such as regional ones, including those of the Jewish experience and of the speci city of the Holocaust. On another level, speci c to France, the change also came from the diplomatic turning point implemented by General de Gaulle who, now that the Algerian War was over, went back to the project of a grand- scale Arab policy. The alliance between France and Israel was no longer in favour: in a press conference in 1967, General de Gaulle referred to the Jews as a “chosen people, sure of themselves and domineering”, remarks which had the effect not only of alienating part of the Jewish population in the country, but also of suggesting that the Republican model of integration, con ning the Jews purely and simply to assimila- tion was not an absolute guarantee for them. This also created a climate conducive to the af rmation of a Jewish identity, including in the public sphere. And this identity would be constructed to include not only a strong identi cation with the State of Israel but also extreme sensitivity to anything which could in any way bring to mind the Holocaust. However, to date France has not really undertaken the labour of remembrance and re ection which World War II demands: a past which, with Vichy and collaboration, is not con ned to the Resistance. Indeed, it is this same climate which allows, if not a recognition of the central importance of the destruction of the Jews to Nazi barbarism and the role of France in this experience, at least a serious consider- ation of the Vichy period. Thus, we witnessed the fairly rapid success of Marcel Ophuls’ (1971) lm, Le Chagrin et la Pitié, or books on this period, beginning with the American historian, Robert Paxton’s, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1973). Once again, more detailed work would reveal other internal and external factors which may have contributed to the emergence or recognition of the Shoah as central to the experience of Nazism and to the memory of the countries which have just been mentioned. Furthermore, it might bring into play other aspects speci c to other countries (Germany in particular). But here too, the main point to note is what is revealed by a study of the 1960s, however incomplete and super cial: the co-production at global level, with national speci ci- ties, of an awareness of the unique and central nature of the Shoah in western experience. The destruction of the European Jews by the
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Nazis had little meaning in public debate in the 1950s; it was now to take on its full meaning. Indeed, for some twenty years, the Jews in the Diaspora lived through a golden age protected by the meaning or the ever greater signi cance of the Shoah in western public opinion. From being marginal, the Shoah, in effect, moved not only to a central position in Jewish consciousness but also, on a broader scale, in Western consciousness. It guaranteed a form of absolute protection, a powerful defence against any risk of anti-Semitic tendencies. In the United States, the ‘golden age’ for American Jews became ‘even more golden’15 despite their repeated references to the reappearance of anti-Semitism. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s are the years during which discrimination against Jews totally disappeared from the land and opinion polls showed a decline in anti-Semitism. At the same time, the Holocaust came to be the heart of the image which American Jews had of themselves, perhaps core to the de nition of Jewish identity, as Peter Novick suggests (but this interpretation has been criticised), not least as a result of the activity of American Jewish organisations. Nevertheless, the Holocaust is not, for all that, a Jewish speci city; it has entered into American consciousness as witnessed, for example, by its place in the school curricula or even in Hollywood productions for cinema and television. The success of the Holocaust series (April 1978) was that of a revelation, in melodramatic form, of the destruction of the European Jews. Fifteen years later, the success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) was based on far superior historical and cinemato- graphic qualities. Novick quotes a 1990 opinion poll which showed that a clear majority of Americans considered that the Holocaust “had been the worst tragedy in history”. In France, the general development was very comparable. From being marginal in the collective French consciousness, the Holocaust was to become the most ef cient defence possible against anti-Semitism, with the term giving way in 1985 to that of Shoah, popularised by Claude Lanzmann’s lm—a lm which perhaps marks the apogee in the pro- cess of becoming aware of and attributing a powerful meaning to the Holocaust. Simone de Beauvoir wrote: [. . .] Seeing Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary lm today, we realise that we knew nothing. Despite all our knowledge, the atrocious experience
15 Id. p. 175.
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remained remote from us. For the rst time, we experience it in our minds, our hearts and our bodies. It becomes ours [. . .]. Shoah succeeds in recreating the past [. . .]. Like all the spectators, I mix the past with the present [. . .]. It is this confusion which characterises the miraculous aspect of Shoah.16 In literature, on television, in the cinema and at the theatre, but also in the social sciences, beginning with history, which seemed to be work- ing twice as hard to make up for lost time, the genocide of the Jews penetrated far beyond the Jewish consciousness. In France, it is also part of the school curriculum. After understanding or considering the Vichy regime somewhat late in the day, society, and sometimes the judiciary was coming to grips with this past. In 1981, Le Canard enchaîné launched the Papon affair; this high-ranking civil servant was accused of crimes against humanity in 1983 and sentenced in 1998 to ten years in prison for complicity in crimes against humanity. In July 1987, Klaus Barbie was sentenced in Lyon, again for crimes against humanity. Paul Touvier, who was arrested in May 1989 and judged in 1994, died in prison in July 1996. On 8 June 1993, René Bousquet, who had been general secretary of the Vichy police, was assassinated by a mentally unbalanced person just when a complaint had been led against him for crimes against humanity. In France, the fear of a resurgence of anti-Semitism nonetheless lives on, attributed to its old protagonists, the extreme right. It was revived by the terrorist attacks in October 1980 (Rue Copernic, in Paris) and in August 1982 on the Goldenberg restaurant (Rue des Rosiers in Paris)—although these attacks were the work of people from the Middle East. Against a historical background favourable to the victims, the Jews in France found in the Shoah what seemed to be a staunch form of protection: had they not survived the most absolute barbarism, the inhumanity of a project of destruction which could not be anything other than repulsive to the whole world? For all the political powers, the Christian authorities which had accomplished their aggiornamento with Vatican II, the heads of educational and judicial institutions, the spectre of the Shoah and, sometimes, the acts of penitence, made it impossible to envisage a further wave of anti-Semitism. The slightest signs of revival, whether real or imagined, were immediately agged
16 In the preface to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (the full text of the lm), Paris, Fayard, 1985, pp. 7–10.
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up, denounced and repressed. At the same time, an active policy was implemented, some examples of which we have just listed, including material reparations by public bodies as a result of the Mattéoli mission, which in turn had been set up in a general climate in which the main initiatives came from the United States. In the France of the 1970s and 1980s, considerable space was devoted to the Shoah forming a defence against the resurgence of anti-Semitism, which could only operate at the margins. It was not surprising that the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras in 1990, which had long been attributed to the Front national in various circles was the work, as we were to learn six years later, of young neo-Nazis and not of this party. The Front national’s strategy was to act not in a violent and directly anti-Semitic manner, but at an ideological level, by attacking, precisely, the theme of the Shoah, and that only since the mid-1980s.
Loss of Meaning
In France, since the 1980s, the Shoah has had to compete with other tragic events. It has been banalised and weakened. As a result, it has lost some of its meaning. This has occurred despite the resolute politi- cal stance adopted by those in the top political posts. One of Jacques Chirac’s rst gestures, on being elected President of the Republic for the rst time, was to make an important speech in which he recognised the responsibility of the French State in the Vichy period. From the time of its emergence in the public arena in the 1960s, the prominence of the Holocaust had the paradoxical effect of producing effects contrary to those evoked above. By encouraging Jews to set this historical event at the centre of their identity, and in the public sphere, this prominence made victims of them and gave them visibility. Now other groups, peoples and nations, de ned in ethnic, racial or religious terms have been subjected to barbarism, genocide, slavery and mass crimes: one consequence of the recognition of the Shoah is to have awakened groups other than the Jews, and to have inspired other victims also to set themselves up as collective players and to demand recogni- tion and reparation. Even when they have not been set up as such, the recent victims of extreme violence in ex-Yugoslavia, then the African Great Lakes, have penetrated western consciousness and shown that after Nazism other dreadful experiences had been allowed to assume the proportions of genocide. In the words of the title of Jean-Michel
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Chaumont’s book, La Concurrence des Victimes, we have entered the era of competition amongst victims. Henceforth, the Jews may appear to wish to monopolise the status of historical victims, particularly as they evoke the ‘uniqueness’ of the Shoah. Resentment and jealousy can therefore make inroads and, depending on the circumstances, be transformed or extended into hatred of Jews—into anti-Semitism. Since the 1980s, the misadventures of the Israel-Palestine con ict have also had an impact on perceptions where, ultimately, the Shoah has become not only an increasingly fragile shield, but also an arm which has now turned against those whom it hitherto protected. In 1982, the Israeli incursion into Lebanon under ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ led to the departure for Tunis of the Palestinians from the PLO who were living there and tarnished the image of Israel and its army. The principle of this operation was highly controversial and moreover, it afforded the Christian militia the opportunity to engage in the atroci- ties of Sabra and Chatila, two Palestinian refugee camps of which the population was subjected to a dreadful massacre. The Israelis were held responsible: they were said to have stood by or, at the very least, not to have taken the necessary steps to prevent these crimes. The rst intifada (1987) followed by the second one (September 2000), after the failure of the peace process initiated in Oslo in 1993, meant that the Israeli army had to deal with a threat which was no longer far off and outside its borders, but nearby, and even internal in 1987, since at that time there was as yet no Palestinian Authority. From then on, large swathes of international public opinion distanced themselves from the policy of Israel and, amongst those who chose to identify with the Palestinians, some were tempted, quite simply, to make no distinction between Jews and Israelis, and to attribute the misfortunes of the Palestinians to both, indiscriminately. In France (as in the United States), this tendency to make no distinction between the two was encouraged by the discourse of the Jewish community leaders who showed unconditional support not only for the State of Israel but also, in most cases, for the policy of its government. A new discourse developed: the Jews did indeed experience a terrible fate during World War II, but was it not time to recognise that from now on they were no longer victims but torturers—the Israelis directly, by the fate to which they subjected the Palestinians, the Jews in the Diaspora less directly, by their support for Israel’s policy? The Holocaust was not denied but reversed: the Palestinians today were to be like the Jews of yesterday, the victims of genocide.
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In France, this discourse had considerable resonance. Not only was it the driving force behind the words of numerous people of immigrant descent who identi ed their suffering (racism, social exclusion) with that of the Palestinians, but also, in watered-down versions, behind many of the extreme left or alterglobalist stances. It goes further than banalising the Holocaust; it deprives the Jews of the Holocaust by handing it over, so to speak, to other protagonists. The combination of ‘competition amongst victims’ and a somewhat caustic criticism of the State of Israel is a transnational phenomenon. Thus the World Conference against Racism in Durban in August 2001 was dominated and undermined by the rapprochement, at least verbally, of radical Islamism, extreme left ideologies and references to certain victims, in particular of slavery and the Palestinian cause. In a climate which was particularly hostile to the United States and Israel, anti-Semitism very explicitly made inroads: during Fidel Castro’s speech to the NGO’s forum, some shouts of ‘Kill the Jews’ were heard following the slogans ‘Free Palestine’; the Union of Arab League Lawyers was sell- ing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on its stand and distributing tracts likening the Jews to the Nazis; another anonymous tract showed a photo of Hitler with the caption: “What if he had won? There would have been no Israel and no Palestinian blood would have been shed”.17 Thus the Shoah, which had already been relativised by the Front national—as we have seen, Jean-Marie Le Pen considers the gas chambers to be ‘a detail’ in the history of World War II—has been banalised, has competitors and is accused of legitimising a gruesome ‘business’. The Jews are increasingly becoming the object of a reversal process in which they become the guilty party. Against this background, the Shoah is beginning to lose its meaning just when it had achieved full recogni- tion. The Shoah can no longer rely on the memory of a unique form of barbarism in history, one which targets a speci c people, to counter the risks of anti-Semitism. The result is that, as an example, the Shoah has in some instances become problematic in nature and those who are responsible for teaching the lessons that can be drawn from it in schools have dif culty in assigning a meaning to it and in squaring, for teaching purposes, what it demonstrates of both the universal—learn- ing to recognise the paths leading to the worst abominations—and the speci c—remembering that it destroyed a speci c people.
17 We rely here on Fiammetta Venner’s written account.
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But perhaps this sense of loss of meaning must be counterbalanced by the consideration that what is also, and even predominantly, at stake is a two-fold phenomenon of the passage of time and institutionalisa- tion. There are now very few survivors of the Holocaust left and with them disappears a voice which, particularly in schools, had an impact. Our historical knowledge is now sound and it is dif cult to imagine any drastic changes in this respect. The confrontation with Vichy which came late in the day has now entered into our consciousness. The memory of the Shoah has been established in the public sphere, the rst instance being the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, set up in December 2000. Should we now ascribe the loss of meaning to anti- Semitic attacks and competition amongst victims or to the passage of time and the institutionalisation of the recognition of the Holocaust? The fact remains that the latter can no longer be so central to Jewish identity; nor can it be the main defence against the threat of a reap- pearance or renewal of anti-Semitism. Its message is no longer what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was very much with us and its extent unchallenged: this is also what comes across in the current expressions of hatred for Jews in the public sphere.
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GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM
Today the hypothesis of a renewal of anti-Semitism is frequently associ- ated with a speci c group which is said to be much more involved in it than others, namely, ‘youths of North African immigrant descent’ who identify with the Palestinian cause and radical Islamism. However valid this association and however strong this identi cation, it invites us to look beyond the framework of the nation-state and to consider the globalisation of anti-Semitism. Even in the dim and distant past, hatred of Jews has never been con ned to a restricted geographical area. It has often been spread over vast territories while at the same time becoming anchored locally where it has manifested itself in a speci c form. Consequently, we can- not consider present-day anti-Semitism in France without setting it in a context of time and space. Furthermore, we have to consider whether the term ‘anti-Semitism’ which we have used unquestioningly to date is the most appropriate word to use. Can we use the same term for a phenomenon which has undergone considerable changes in history? Are we not committing the error of anachronism by applying it to experiences other than the one in which it was forged?
Anti-Semitism, Anti-Judaism and Judeophobia
The vocabulary in use today provides us with three major terms to designate our object. The word ‘anti-Semitism’ with the current meaning was popularised (but not created, as is frequently suggested), and with dazzling success, by a German advertiser, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879.1 Against the background
1 The term was apparently used for the rst time in 1860, by Moritz Steinschneider He criticised Ernest Renan for his ‘anti-Semitic’ prejudices—Renan is in fact refer- ring to ‘Semites’ in general, and not only to Jews. Cf. M. Steinschneider, Hebräische Bibliographie. Blätter für neuere und ältere Literatur des Judentums, vol. III, Berlin, A. Ascher & Comp., 1860.
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of the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as of the racist ideologies that were rife which had not as yet been criminalised by Nazism, the term was established, laden with biological connotations. From this point on, the Jews were to constitute a race, which was Semitic, with presumed physical characteristics which were the basis for moral or intellectual attributes and for their malignity. This does not mean that modern anti-Semitism is homogeneous. On the contrary, it is even characterised by its capacity to amalgamate in plain language the most contradictory meanings. It may well accuse the Jews of personifying modernity and ushering in its most harmful aspects while at the same time preventing modernity with their religion or their traditional way of life. In this sense, anti-Semitism is as much a perversion of the legacy of the Enlightenment as it is a product of Christianity. As factors of modernity, Jews may be detested for their presumed role as the rul- ing class, their capitalist power, their control of the media or even for their presumed identi cation with intellectual, political or social protest movements, the revolution or with Communism. Similarly, they are just as likely to stand accused of ensuring the in ltration of industry or of modern nancing at the expense of traditional ways of life as of depriving other potential candidates of the possibility of playing a modernising role. When it is a question of accusing them of prevent- ing modernity, they are perceived primarily as traditional communities, de ning themselves rst and foremost in terms of their religion, endea- vouring to appear as a ‘nation’, including in the public sphere where there is little room for the expression of their speci city.2 Depending on the time and place, they are sometimes one, sometimes the other and sometimes both at once— gures, then, of absolute evil. Why this should be so has continued to be a challenge to many researchers down the centuries. For Leon Poliakov, for example, the Jews ultimately enabled those who turned against them to have ready to hand an elementary and exhaustive set of causes to explain their dif culties,3 while for Yves Chevalier, anti-Semitism is associated with a scapegoat mentality which ensures processes for regulating social crises in symbolic terms.4
2 For a systematic presentation of these contradictions in a particularly complex situa- tion, cf. my article “Analyse sociologique et historique de l’antisémitisme en Pologne”, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, vol. XCIII, 1992, pp. 237–249. 3 Léon Poliakov, La Causalité diabolique, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1980. 4 Yves Chevalier, L’Antisémitisme, Paris, Cerf, 1988.
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The concept of anti-Semitism de nes the Jews as a race (Semitic) whereas the concept of anti-Judaism de nes them as a religion. Once this distinction has been made, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ can be extended, somewhat anachronistically to be sure, to the whole period of modernity beginning in Spain at the end of the 15th century where, well before Wilhelm Marr, the word nevertheless already referred to a racialised or biological de nition of the Jews. It was indeed with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and from Portugal, which began in 1492, that the idea began to take shape that those who remained and converted to Christianity remained Jewish by reason of their blood—whence the status of ‘pure bloods’. From then on, the Jews were not perceived uniquely in religious terms: it was their biological characteristics which made them a group apart. Before, they had not really been de ned in racial terms; they came to be so—a development which may legitimise the use of the term, anti-Semitism. While it is tempting to use this term for the whole of the modern period, at least as from the 16th century (although the turning point may have been earlier, in the 12th or 13th century according to Gavin L. Langmuir5 for example), should we not beware of using it for the current period? For, what does seem to be most novel about the phenomenon is formulated in terms which may indeed naturalise the Jews, for example by comparing them to animals—traditionally, in the Arab-Muslim world, the comparison is with monkeys and pigs—but without really describing them in terms of race. In the hatred directed at them today, the wily characteristics attributed to the Jews have little to do with major physical or biological characteristics, and there is not really any even vaguely scienti c theory to explain the threat which they are said to pose to society, the planet or certain more closely de ned groups of people. In that respect, the hostility towards them follows the general trend of all present-day forms of racism, which no longer look to science to support the idea of difference or inferiority particular to any one presumed ‘race’ and which, on the contrary, leave consider- able room for cultural, religious, national or ethnic identities. It is the identi cation of Jews with the State of Israel which is denounced and
5 Gavin L. Langmuir, Toward a De nition of Antisemitism, University of California Press, 1990, and History, Religion and Antisemitism, University of California Press, 1990. Cf. also Jeanne Favret-Saada, Le Christianisme et ses juifs, 1800–2000, Paris, Le Seuil, 2004, which challenges the idea of a recent break or a discontinuity between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.
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not their genetic make-up. This also explains why even the most viru- lent anti-Zionist campaign can be waged by Jews: when this campaign becomes anti-Semitic, its participants retain the ability to distinguish between the Jews who share the radical criticism of Israel and those who do not. The argument then sometimes appears to be reversed: the anti-Zionist militants say that it is not they who are racist but Israel which treats the Arabs and, more generally, anyone who is not Jewish, in a racist manner. Would anti-Judaism be a suitable term to describe the present-day renewal of hatred of the Jews? To answer in the af rmative would mean that today the issue is de ned in terms which are predominantly religious or anti-religious. It is true that Islam may be the source of some references to this de nition, and we shall return to this point. But it is only as an afterthought that Judaism, the religion of the ‘Isra- elites’ (a term which is totally outmoded today) is the target of acts of violence or remarks hostile to Jews. Anti-Judaism is so intimately linked to the history of Christianity, much more than to that of Islam, that it is better to keep this word to refer to Christian history. It is true that Jean-Claude Milner does state that “anti-Judaism has a future,” whereas “anti-Semitism is obsolete. It was associated with the Jewish problem as it was posed in pre-1945 Europe. Now this problem has been resolved; we know how and why”.6 But from there to adopting the word ‘anti-Judaism’ to designate, as he does, the major form of hatred of the Jews in the future, is a step which we will not take: Jew- ish identity, as it appears in the discourse of hostility towards the Jews today, apparently cannot be reduced to Judaism alone, at least not if we mean by that the religious dimension of this af liation. Would the term ‘Judeophobia’, which is open and all-encompass- ing, not enable us to do away with the term ‘anti-Semitism’ for the present period? Anti-Semitism would then become inappropriate and anachronistic and we would not have to con ne ourselves to the overly restrictive categorisation offered by the concept of anti-Judaism. It is in these terms that Pierre-André Taguieff argues in favour of setting aside the term ‘anti-Semitism’, explaining that it should be reserved for: the explicitly racist Judeophobia, which was born towards the middle of the 19th century and fell into disuse after 1945, according to which
6 Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2003, p. 127.
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the Jews were an example of a harmful and dangerous inferior race and which only constituted a brief episode—barely one century—in the long history of anti-Jewish views and practices.7 According to him, we have now entered a ‘new’ era of Judeophobia, characterised by an ‘inexpiable’ hatred of Israel, an ‘absolute’, ‘demonis- ing’ form of anti-Zionism with overtones of negationism and a world view ensuring the convergence “of the new anti-neoliberal leftism and the warriors of the radical Islamist movements”.8 The term Judeophobia itself is recent and dates from the same period as anti-Semitism. Taguieff notes that he borrowed it from Leo Pinsker;9 Peter Schäfer10 states that he found it in the title of an article by J. Halévy dated 1903. It has the advantage of being timeless and of specifying the target of the hatred (the Jews and anything Jewish) without necessarily specifying the content of what is targeted (a religion, a race, a state, a people, a nation, etc.). But does this not take away its edge? Does it not disregard the speci city of this very unique hostility which has traversed time and space for perhaps 25 centuries? Containing the idea of a ‘phobia’, the term anti-Semitism becomes pathological and part of a view which tends to be more medical or psychological than political or historical. Peter Schäfer, studying Judeophobia in the ancient world, uses the word ‘anti-Semitism’ deliberately. Obviously well aware of the risk of anachronism, he notes that the concept of race in ancient Egypt, for example, could not be the same as in modern times. But he also observes that the ancient pagan hatred of the Jews and the violence based on it was not uniquely religious or xenophobic. Accord- ing to him, it was the outcome of an ‘ingrained hostility’ predating the facts and which he describes as ‘anti-Semitic’. This discussion brings us closer to a question which is also very sen- sitive: should we consider hatred or hostility towards the Jews as one form of racism amongst others, or should we note its radical difference?
7 Pierre-André Taguieff, “Retour sur la nouvelle judéophobie”, Cités, special issue, June 2002, p. 118. Cf. his book, La Nouvelle Judéophobie, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002. (Rising from the Muck: the new anti-semitism in Europe, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.) 8 Id., p. 119. 9 Taguieff refers to Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, the rst edition (Berlin) is dated 1882. 10 Peter Schäfer , Judeophobia. Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World, Harvard University Press, 1997 (Paris, Cerf, 2003).
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This question merits three separate answers depending on whether we approach it from a sociological, historical or political point of view. From a strictly sociological point of view, this hatred and hostil- ity call for the same analytical categories as other forms of racism, to which they are to some extent related. Like them, they naturalise or demonise a group of people, manifest themselves in various ways (violence, prejudices, discrimination, segregation, etc.), may or may not nd their way to the political level and in various ways combine the rationales of differentialist rejection and inferiorisation. In any given society, they function according to mechanisms in which there is no fundamental distinction between anti-Semitism, by whatever name, and other types of racism. However, if we adopt a historical stance, the picture is quite different. Anti-Semitism then appears as something extremely unique, given the remarkable depth and continuity of the phenomenon from ancient times to the present day. We have to admit that no other group in history has been subjected to such an experience, to such an extent, with little respite throughout the centuries and on such a large geographical scale. It is the perception of continuity and even of the relative coherence of this experience which explains, for example, the success and importance of Léon Poliakov’s immense Histoire de l’antisémitisme. Finally, politically, any consideration of hostility towards the Jews involves examining how it has been dealt with in the society under the microscope, in comparison to other forms of racism. Thus, in France today, including and perhaps primarily in circles which cannot be suspected of the slightest degree of racism, a genuine irritation is perceptible at the realisation of a disproportion between the exag- gerated sensitivity of the political class, of opinion or the media to any manifestation of anti-Semitism and the much greater indifference towards other racist excesses. The very fact that we can put a name to the racism targeting the Jews, whereas we do not have a suf ciently precise vocabulary for other groups of people is sometimes described as an injustice: even as victims, the Jews fare better because they have a term to describe their misfortunes. The fact remains that a debate has opened, for example within anti-racist organisations or amongst intellectuals, between those who, like the MRAP, demand that anti- Semitism should not be singled out in the political and ideological campaign against racism and those who, on the contrary, insist on the speci city of the problem.
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The more one endeavours to identify a speci city in the hatred of the Jews as compared with other forms of racism, the less one has to consider whether it should be referred to as Judeophobia, anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism. Ultimately, it suf ces to speak of anti-Jewish racism. But to do so would be to bring matters to an abrupt conclusion. In our opinion, the choice is as follows: should we, at the risk of anach- ronisms, be more sensitive to historical continuity, to the speci city of the hostility towards the Jews and to the strength that the concept of anti-Semitism has acquired and, nally, keep this term? Would it not be better to recognise that we have entered a new era, to which we cannot really give a name but which can be characterised, cautiously, precisely, by the term ‘new Judeophobia’? We, for our part, intend to go on using the term ‘anti-Semitism’, with the idea that it is a speci c form of hatred, which reached its peak with Nazi barbarism. Any other term takes the edge off the phenomenon and loses part of the strength which its evocation acquired in 20th century history. Paradoxically, the ‘new Judeophobia’ is not the sum total of a combination of elements of which classical anti-Semitism is only an ‘old’ outmoded element: it tends to be one of many dimensions, although central, of the revival of anti-Semitism today.
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
Hatred of the State of Israel is so central to the prevailing anti-Semitic discourse in France that a delicate but unavoidable question arises: where do anti-Israel political propaganda and criticism of the Hebrew State begin? At what point do we discern therein hatred of the Jews? In other words: how can we be sure that the rejection of Israel is of a different order from hatred of Jews in general—where does the one leave off and the other begin? In short, is there a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? This question, at once emotional and complex, is the subject of erce debate in France. Is the equation anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism so obvious that it is less and less open to argument, or, as Denis Sieffert11 claims, ‘both outrageous and monstrous’?
11 In a collective publication, Antisémitisme : l’intolérable chantage. Israël-Palestine, une affaire française?, Paris, La Découverte, 2003.
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We have to begin by stating that the vocabulary used poses a prob- lem. Anything to do with the State of Israel is frequently quali ed as ‘Zionist’ rather than ‘Israeli’, which adds to the confusion. For, if those who criticise Israel’s policy describe themselves or are perceived as ‘anti-Zionist’, there is nothing to prevent us from thinking that they are challenging not so much the action of a state but the intention behind it, or its very existence. We must therefore pause for an instant and consider this word ‘Zionism’. Any discussion of Zionism refers to a project of which the age and the historical depth, predating Theodor Herzl, extends, for example, to the ‘pre-historic Christian Zionism’ to which Paul Giniewski12 refers, or political thinkers and players, Christian and Jewish in particular, who had imagined, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Emile, a ‘free state’ for the Jews. The project associated with Herzl is far from always having met with the unanimous approval of the Jews. Hence, between the rst Zionist congress in Basel (in 1897) and the creation of the State of Israel (1948), strong opposition was expressed, in particular by the Bund, as we have said. This Jewish social-democratic party considered that the future of the Jewish proletariat in Europe resided in a political struggle in Europe and not in the departure for Palestine. Since the 1960s, these forms of opposition have declined while at the same time it was becoming obvious to the Jews in the Diaspora that the State of Israel was no longer a utopia but a historical reality. The Zionist project had become a reality and more precisely, a state. With the Six Day War, the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora accepted what was now a positive identi cation with Israel. The result is that today Jewish identity falls within the boundaries of religion, anti-Semitism, remembrance of the Shoah and the State of Israel. Of course, not all the Jews in the Diaspora are believers. They do not all necessarily feel threatened by anti-Semitism. Neither the memory of the Shoah nor identi cation with Israel is the same for all and they may endeavour to promote a secular form of Jewish culture in the Diaspora. But they tend to de ne themselves in terms of these four main poles. In the debate about whether anti-Zionism is, or is not, anti-Semitism there is plenty of scope for the expression of Jewish subjectivity and, in most cases, for the two concepts to be confused quite simply because Jewish identity increasingly tends to include a positive reference to Israel.
12 Paul Giniewski , Préhistoire de l’État d’Israël, Paris, Ed. France-Empire, 1997.
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Among the Jews, this lack of differentiation is sometimes total and quite unambiguous; at other times it is more subtle or bypassed and, while this may not be the case for everyone, it nonetheless constitutes the dominant tendency. However, if it is becoming so commonplace, is it not that it refers to a reality and to the fact that, in practice, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism do come down to the same thing for those who profess the one in order better to advance the cause of the other? Ethnocentrism may hamper our thinking here somewhat; hence, for an Arab living in the Middle East, while the enemy may be an Israeli, the latter is also Jewish and the two terms are more easily or spontaneously interchangeable. This does not necessarily mean that the same hatred is felt for the Israelis as for the Jews in the Diaspora. The target is the Zionist Jews in Israel. For the anti-Semite living in France and identifying with the Palestinian cause, the Arab world and Islam, the gure of the hated Jew tends not to be the Israeli in the rst instance. We must therefore certainly accept the idea that the confusion or the amalgam does not have quite the same signi cance in the two types of situation. If anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are coming closer, it is for a reason already referred to above: contrary to an over-simpli ed idea, the anti-Semitism of hate speech is all the more extraordinary for being unconnected with the internal political realities of Israel or the actual experience of the Arab citizens of Israel and the inhabitants of the ‘territories’ and for spreading to places which are farther a eld and dominated by imagination and fantasy. These may just as well be the working-class areas of Egypt or Jordan as the most deprived of the French banlieues or suburbs. It is not dif cult, however, at least theoretically, to say where the dividing line lies between challenging the existence of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism. When it is a question of describing the politics of the Israeli government or of the Israel-Palestine con ict, in terms which may possibly be extremely harsh, the criticism cannot be called anti-Semitic simply because it targets the practices of this state, the repression of terrorism, the behaviour of its army, the settlement of the colonies, the violence of the settlers, etc. It becomes anti-Semitic, or at least comes much nearer to it when the very existence of the Hebrew State is challenged. For, the arguments which are then advanced con- cern, not only this State, but the Jewish people in their entirety and in a discriminatory manner. Some of these arguments insist on the idea that there is a funda- mental link between the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel.
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Now, while it is certain that the discovery and understanding of Nazi barbarism did promote the creation of the state and had an impact on it, we would do well to remember the prior existence of the Zionist project, the long-standing existence of a Jewish settlement in Palestine and the presence of Jews on this territory since time immemorial. Too close a link between the Shoah and the creation of Israel creates the impression that the Hebrew State is the outcome of victimisation, for which it only partly compensates, thus sustaining a questionable notion of history which favours the equation Jews = victims = Israel. It must be said that this equation is itself encouraged by the similar proposi- tion: anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. Sometimes the arguments combine historical aspects and judicial elements to challenge the very existence of Israel. The Arab or the Palestinian presence in Palestine is said to have preceded that of the Jews and the undertaking of the Jewish people to have transformed itself into a nation and to have demanded and obtained the right to form a state is said to be illegitimate. Here too, the argument is spe- cious. For one thing, it is based on a historical construct which is worth discussing: how did the immigration of the Jews to Israel take place before and after 1948? What were the relations between the Arabs and the Jews—purchase of land, plundering, violence and labour relations? How were Jews treated in Arab countries and how were they treated thereafter? What exactly were the migratory processes of the Arabs to Palestine? How did Arab leaders and Muslim dignitaries behave in the face of Nazism? Research like that of Henry Laurens13 shows plainly that history is more complex than the supporters of the various camps would have us believe, particularly when the Zionist experience is reduced to colonialism and the plight of the Palestinians to exclusion, for which the Zionists and their friends alone are said to be responsible. The question can be formulated in judicial terms: by virtue of what principle is it permissible to forbid the Jews from thinking of themselves as a nation in the same way as others and from wanting to have a state? On the basis of what judicial criteria can this sort of prohibition be justi ed? And if this criteria only applies to the Jewish people, is it not, in reality, a desire to discriminate which is a sign of anti-Semitism?
13 Cf. in particular Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine, Paris, Fayard, 2002.
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Moreover, it is dif cult to see what legitimacy could be attributed to the United Nations if the 1947 decision, which was voted by a majority of two thirds, were to be challenged. Any discourse which questions the very existence of the State of Israel, and not uniquely its functioning, rapidly leads to a denial. It denies the right of the Jewish people to a state. In this respect, the discourse does contain an element of hostility towards this people, which is refused the same modes of collective existence as are granted to others. The very term, anti-Zion- ism, facilitates this confusion between the State of Israel as it is and the project on which it is based. We must therefore clearly state that if criticism of Israeli policy, and, for example, of its expansion through the settlement of colonies, is acceptable, any criticism which goes back to the creation of this state to challenge its very existence, is not. This is a position which is clear and is expressed suf ciently explicitly and frequently within Israeli society itself for it to be, if not acceptable, at least free of any anti-Semitism. The State of Israel is sometimes accused of being racist and the accusation may then extend to the Jewish people as a whole. This touches on a particularly sensitive point when it refers to the very foundations of this state which claims, and rightly so, to be democratic while at the same time asserting itself as a Jewish State. It is a fact that the so-called law of return, under which any Jew can come and live in Israel with no conditions attached and immediately and automati- cally become a citizen, does discriminate against non-Jews who have to request permission. The criteria for establishing who is Jewish are dif cult to list, apart from the one usually advanced by religious Jews for whom the mother must be Jewish. This naturalises the de nition of identity and can be compared to an ethnic or even racial14 notion. The question has political and social consequences: how can a Jewish state be created while at the same time democratically guaranteeing equal rights to everyone, Jew or non-Jew? In practice, as Laurence Louër15 shows, the answer consists in differentiating between two categories of residents, the Jews and the others—amongst which are, primarily,
14 For an idea of the complexity of the problem and the discussions to which it gives rise amongst Israelis themselves, cf. Eliezer Ben Rafaël, Jewish identities: fty intellectuals answer Ben Gurion, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2002. 15 Laurence Louër , Les Citoyens arabes d’Israël, Paris, Balland, 2002.
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the Arab citizens of Israel—and thus in allowing a two-tier citizenship to develop. In fact, the Arabs of Israel only accede to ordinary citizenship with dif culty and not fully. They do vote, at all levels, they have local elected members and are represented in the Knesset. But access to land and to ownership of land is dif cult for them, they have no right to family reunion and, apart from the Druzes and the Bedouins, they are excluded from the sphere of military conscription. In the words of Laurence Louër, they constitute a category which is “acephalous and deprived of community institutions and autonomous sources of income”, and for whom “citizenship . . . tends to lose all substance”.16 This is obviously a huge problem for the State of Israel in addition to the separate issue of the con ict with the Palestinians, and which can give rise to the extremely keen, but quite legitimate criticism: how can the principle of such an unequal citizenship be accepted? And once again it is easy to see where anti-Semitism may begin: in the idea that this challenge in some way refers back to a sort of racism which is inherent to the Jewish people and not to the present-day dif culties of a state which is confronted with a major contradiction, since it is at one and the same time both Jewish and democratic.
A ‘Global’ Phenomenon
Since the end of the Cold War, the theme of globalisation has inevi- tably emerged in describing international rationales which make light of frontiers and states, particularly in the economic sphere. These principles have an impact on anti-Semitism which in turn has become in its own way a ‘global’ phenomenon.
Beyond the Nation-State For some thinkers, philosophers, historians or others, anti-Semitism is rst and foremost a European phenomenon. Jean-Claude Milner in particular explains that, “Modern Europe is the place where:
16 Id., pp. 30 and 41.
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a. the noun ‘Jew’ is thought of as a problem to resolve; b. a solution is only valid if it aims to be de nitive [. . .] the problem/solu- tion pair has determined the modern history of the word ‘Jew’ from the 18th century to the present day”.17 For Jean-Claude Milner, “old Europe [. . .] is the cause of everything [. . .]. It formulated everything, de ned everything, and invented every- thing”.18 And if anti-Semitism, (as we have seen, he prefers, when referring to present times, to speak of anti-Judaism) focusses nowadays on Israel as the centre of hatred of the Jews, it is because Europe not only no longer needs this state to de ne itself but nds it an ‘embar- rassment’. Israel keeps to the form of the nation-state which, according to Milner, Europe is preparing to abandon, claiming “to know nothing about it any longer”.19 For others, it is more appropriate to think of the present renewal, as coming from the Arab-Muslim world rather than Europe and, more precisely, in terms of the two sources that this formula perhaps over hastily associates: Arab traditions on one hand and Islam on the other. Is there not a long tradition in Arab or Muslim countries whereby the Jews are a despised and hated minority? Do the Koran and the Sunna not both curse the Jews, at least those who do not believe in God, describing them as lost souls who have become the brothers of pigs and monkeys? We should add here that it is preferable to speak of an invention of tradition rather than a tradition as such: anti-Semitism of Islamic origin has spread considerably since the 1960s or 1970s. The fact remains that when discussing the renewal of anti-Semitism in France today, the more the Arab or Muslim origins of its bearers are stressed, the more tempting it becomes to see it as an imported product brought into the country in the baggage of immigrant parents or grandparents, in particular from North Africa where hostility towards Jews is said to have been by and large part of the culture, even perhaps anchored in daily life, later to be stirred up or revived by the media or the Internet which ensures a constant link with the Middle East. That Europe or the European idea does play a speci c role in pres- ent-day anti-Semitism in France is undeniable. It is not just France, a major producer of fascist or racist ideologies, as the historian,
17 Jean-Claude Milner, op. cit., p. 13. 18 Id., p. 15. 19 Id., p. 128.
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Zeev Sternhell20 has demonstrated. It is equally undeniable that we should also take the role of the past and of memory into account as well as that of present-day relations, via the media, with all that the Middle East contributes in this respect. This leaves us with no choice but to accept the concept of ‘globalisation’. To describe hatred of Jews as ‘global’21 is in fact to admit that it is at one and the same time international, transnational and localised. It is an attempt to think of anti-Semitism at one and the same time in terms of its most general, global and local dimensions—rooted as they are within a country, a region, a town, a local area or a housing estate. If, for example, we want to understand why a youth in a ‘dif cult’ area throws stones at a Jewish school bus, we undoubtedly have to take into consideration factors associated with the situation (daily exclusion and racism, for example), along with others concerning the international state of affairs, in particular in the Middle East.
The Global Principle of Anti-Semitism Today22 As David Harvey23 has aptly demonstrated, the globalisation of anti- Semitism is based on a dual compression of both time and space. It amalgamates elements originating in historically and geographically distinct repertories which its propagandists have no dif culty in merg- ing. This may include anything and everything: accusations of ritual crimes, as in the somewhat distant past when a Christian anti-Judaism was prevalent in Europe; repeated references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an invention which originated in the imagination of the Tsarist regime and its police; a return to the classically racist themes of modern anti-Semitism at its peak, as we have seen, between the end of the 19th century and Nazism; revisionism and negationism, minimising, banalising or denying the existence of Auschwitz and the gas chambers;
20 Zeev Sternhell , La Droite révolutionnaire. Les origines françaises du fascisme, 1885–1914, Paris, Le Seuil, 1984. 21 This idea of a ‘global’ phenomenon is also to be found in a book co-edited by Paul Iganski and Barry Kasmin, A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st Century Britain, JPR, London, 2003. Some, but not all, of the authors of this collective publica- tion prefer to speak of Judeophobia rather than anti-Semitism. 22 A rst version of this text was published in the online journal Proche-Orient.info, 13 May 2003. 23 David Harvey , The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change, Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell, 1990, p. 240.
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denunciation of the ‘Shoah business’—said to be a source of wealth for the Jews and Israel; or even accusations attributing the responsibil- ity for anti-Semitism to the Jews themselves as a result, for example, of some of the presumed activities of certain persons as ‘lobbyists’ in the service of the State of Israel, or of the positions adopted by them in public discussion. At the same time, the globalisation of anti-Semitism is to a large extent due to electronic technologies which enable the instantaneous circulation throughout the world of texts, sounds and images and par- ticularly, propaganda. The Internet and television are complementary here. However, we do have to differentiate between them because the Internet implies a much more active approach on the part of the user than television. Moreover, in some countries the Internet functions as an organ of the anti-Semitic written press, almost completely freely in some countries; these sites thus ensure world distribution, whatever the country of origin.
Is This a Hitherto Unknown Phenomenon? In fact, throughout history anti-Semitism has always manifested itself in the form of a ‘global’ rationale combining as it does a very large scale territorial presence with a variety of strongholds in local situations. Thus the source of the anti-Semitism of the ancient world (here we are drawing on the work of Peter Schäfer, including the terminology) was Egypt but it spread to Syria-Palestine and then to Rome where it acquired a special meaning in so far as, in addition to hatred and hostility, it was fraught with fear. As Schäfer remarks, this is one more reason for not using the term ‘Judeophobia’, which may be accept- able in Rome but not in the other two regions of the ancient world which he studies—“Judeophobia is more appropriate when there is only hatred”.24 It was probably in Egypt at Elephantine towards 410 BC that the rst pogrom in history took place: the Jews were allegedly accused of siding with the Persian occupiers, and the Egyptian population, in a wave of nationalist sentiment, were said to have attacked the Jews for ‘collaborating’ with the foreign power. The story as told by Schäfer
24 Peter Schäfer , op. cit., p. 30.
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is remarkably modern and brings to mind various episodes of recent history, for example in Central Europe, when the Jews were accused of siding with a foreign ruler, notably with the Communist regime imposed by Moscow on a country in the Empire.25 Schäfer also recalls the violent incidents in Alexandria in 38 AD, during which the Egyp- tians attacked the Jews while under Roman rule; the Egyptians were themselves apparently manipulated by the Greeks in the town who were also struggling for access to power and hated the Jews: “The struggle between the various ethnic groups in Alexandria (Greeks, Jews, Egyptians) was the determining factor in the events which led to the explosion in the summer of 38 AD”.26 Schäfer also demonstrates how the accusation of xenophobia, unfriendliness and misanthropy directed at the Jews was a ‘very powerful weapon’27 against them in the area that he calls Syria-Palestine and how in Rome, in the same period, they were perceived as a threat because their proselytism, at that time very active, enabled them to in ltrate society and to hold a ‘growing attraction’28 for society. Further on, Schäfer notes that the Romans inherited the brutal hatred of the Egyptians and the contempt of the Greeks for the Jews but that, further, “They felt intuitively attracted by them and reacted either with kindness and in fact by converting or with fear, aversion and, in fact, hatred”.29 We can therefore already speak of globalisation with reference to the anti-Semitism of the ancient world where it extended over a vast territory with elements common to all and speci cities particular to certain regions. A similar argument could be made for Christianity; throughout history its entire sphere of in uence has favoured anti- Semitism including in the lands where it had missions, for example, the Middle East, where, towards the middle of the 19th century, Christians brought up themes typical of medieval anti-Judaism (the accusation of ritual murders of non-Jews being committed by Jews, or the poisoning of water).
25 Cf. for example my study of the Polish experience, Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarnosc, Paris, Denoël, 1984. 26 Id., p. 263. 27 Id., p. 291. 28 Id., p. 318. 29 Id., p. 322.
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The globalisation of contemporary anti-Semitism is neither a dis- organised nor a destructured phenomenon. It is organised around perceptions which are focussed on a main centre, the Middle East and, more speci cally, the Israel-Palestine con ict. The focus is on challenging the existence of the State of Israel and, as we have seen, this either mutates into a generalised hatred of Jews, or masks it. The ‘global’ principle of anti-Semitism is then conveyed by radical Islamism which goes beyond the Palestinian cause and sets its anti-Jewish action in a context which is genuinely global where the Palestinian con ict ceases to be centre stage and gives way to the idea of a metapoliti- cal struggle against evil, of which the Jews are said to be one of the main manifestations, the other being the United States. It brings anti- Semitism closer to the sphere of present-day terrorism which has itself become ‘global’: the attacks on the synagogue in Djerba in Tunisia (11 April 2002), against the Jewish institutions in Casablanca in Morocco (16 May 2003) and in Istanbul (15 and 20 November 2003) associate terrorism and anti-Semitism, both being ‘global’. Finally, places where there are large concentrations of Jews outside Israel, beginning with the United States and France, have their own speci c contributions to make to the hatred of Jews. Such contributions have their roots in these countries but also spread throughout the remainder of the global arena of anti-Semitism along speci c lines. For example, France has been the origin on several occasions since the 1950s of the revisionist, then the negationist hypotheses which have enjoyed world-wide suc- cess. It is from the United States that the idea has bounced back at us with increased vigour that the Jews exploit their own misfortunes and have set up a ‘Holocaust industry’ to use the words of Norman G. Finkelstein30 in a book which is in all respects a contribution to the spread of these ideas, also at global level. From the moment we agree to consider anti-Semitism as part of a ‘global’ rationale, we must endeavour to ensure that the analysis of any local situation (that of France concerns us here) articulates the internal and the external, and advances an explanation drawing on factors inside and outside of France. Thus changes which are speci c to French society, its institutions and the French idea of the nation undoubtedly have a signi cant impact on the recent renewal of anti-Semitism in this
30 Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry. Re ections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, New York & London, Verso, 2000.
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country, but the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian con ict or the con- sequences of the rise of Islamist terrorism also play a role. Approaches which restrict the phenomenon to its Franco-French dimensions alone or, on the contrary, uniquely to its foreign or transnational dimensions are incomplete and rapidly erroneous.
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THE JEWS IN FRANCE: DEVELOPMENTS AND CONCERNS
It is imperative that we dare to ask a particularly sensitive question. If anti-Semitism is based on an imaginary image of the Jews, is it not also shaped by the relations which do actually exist between the Jews and other groups of people? Is it not also fashioned by the behaviour or the attitudes of the Jews? The social sciences have long come up against this question when they decide to deal with racism and anti- Semitism. To state that these phenomena are completely unconnected with how its targets behave, express themselves and also evolve, is to reduce them to sheer imagination or ideology. To introduce the idea that the behaviour of the targeted group can in uence the feelings which are expressed about them is to risk laying on them at least part of the responsibility for their misfortunes, and transforming the victims into culprits. It is dif cult to nd a happy medium which avoids these two pitfalls. If we now examine the evolution of the Jews in France since the end of World War II, our aim is therefore to shed further light on our analysis, but without making it the central point. Anti-Semitism may be an imaginary construct which has absolutely nothing to do with reality. It may also be the outcome of an over- interpretation of reality which is distorted but does not completely lose touch with reality. Peter Schäfer explains: one always needs both components to ‘create’ anti-Semitism: the anti- Semite and the Jew or Judaism, concrete Jewish peculiarities and the intention of the anti-Semite to distort and to pervert these peculiarities. Anti-Semitism always happens in the mind of the anti-Semite, but it needs its object, the Jew or Judaism [. . .]. It is the distorted imagination of the anti-Semite nourished by real Jews, as well as by his fantasies about Jews, which creates anti-Semitism.1
1 Peter Schäfer, op. cit., p. 8.
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For a long time, Jews in France formed communities—in the Comtat Venaissin,2 in Alsace, in the Parisian region and in Bordeaux—and their emancipation was an important theme for the philosophers of the Enlightenment and during the French Revolution. The model to which they conformed for over a century and half dates from this period and from the rst Empire—a model which Annie Kriegel has described as one of ‘hesitant assimilation’.3 Until the 1960s, at least theoretically, Jews in France were to cease to be visible in the public sphere. In particular, after the Commune, and throughout the dura- tion of the Third Republic, they were to identify fairly clearly with the French nation and with the state institutions. The Dreyfus affair and the power of anti-Semitism which it revealed, something which the huge success of Edouard Drumont’s La France juive had already intimated, did not succeed in shattering this model. The Jews in France have endorsed the republican separation between the private sphere where they are free to practise their religion and the public sphere in which they are free individuals with equal rights, like other citizens: they are citizens of the Israelite denomination, they are Israelites.4 Some of them accede to the highest state of ces—the ‘madmen’ of the Republic whose political history has been researched by Pierre Birnbaum.5 Others, particularly amongst those brought from Central Europe in the waves of immigration following World War I, participated in political and trade union action. They did not all sub- scribe to the rationale of simple assimilation or conform to the strict model of the Israelite. There are various movements—in particular the Zionists and the orthodox Jews—who assert the fact that they are Jewish publicly. But, in the main, the dominant gure is really that of the Israelite who conjugates unobtrusive and private religious practices with great con dence in the Republic and its values of liberty, equality and fraternity, along with a genuine love of the homeland. The waves of Jewish immigration from central Europe between 1880 and 1930
2 Translator’s note: the former name of the region around the city of Avignon in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France. The region was named after its former capital, Venasque. 3 Annie Kriegel, Les Juifs et le monde moderne. Essai sur les logiques d’émancipation, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977. 4 ‘Israélite’ in the French text; (see translators’ note). 5 Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République. Histoire politique des Juifs d’Etat de Gambetta à Vichy, Paris, Le Seuil, 1995.
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bear witness to a strong capacity for integration with the republican model.
The Decline of the Republican Model
There was change across the board in the 1960s due to various factors which it will suf ce to recall brie y here: the arrival of the Jews from North Africa who were usually Sephardic and who formed close-knit communities, the Six Day War (1967) which brought Jews in France closer to the State of Israel and put an end to the image of the Jew as a passive victim—and therefore inconspicuous and even invisible; General de Gaulle’s pro-Arab policy which became possible as soon as the Algerian War had ended; the labour of remembrance concerning the Shoah, insisting on the role of the Vichy regime in the deportation of the French Jews. Moreover, the end of the 1960s was a period of general social change which the French Jews did not escape: the idea of progress was challenged, universalist concepts were questioned, the nation-state was criticised—all ideas which contributed to weakening the French republican model as a whole. Everything converged in the invention of a new model, in which French Jews became a paradigm of French-style multiculturalism. They seemed to have the capacity to personify two contradictory demands and to articulate in a moderate fashion what the Republic traditionally separated and even opposed: the universal values of the republican idea and the speci city of an identity which from then on would be increasingly visible in the public sphere. Protected by the knowledge, if late in the day, and the understand- ing of the Shoah, it was something of a golden age for French Jews. Some marked a religious presence displaying a wide range of religious tendencies from the Lubavitch to the liberal. Others were anxious to educate their children in Jewish schools, which began to grow in number. In the universities, departments for Jewish studies became fashionable while, at the same time, publishers specialising in Jewish themes began to develop. The Jewish culture and the languages which were disap- pearing such as Yiddish and Ladino were once again practised; ad hoc institutions were created or saved. At the same time, the Jewish memory was given pride of place, not only in the form of books and lms but also in ceremonies and in symbolic and material claims. Furthermore, the historiography of World War II, in which the cinema played an
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important role, was taking shape. Jews appeared as Jews in public at the time of the trials of Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon. Finally, French Jews, once again speaking as Jews, were expressing their feelings about Israel with increasing clarity—some to support Israel unconditionally, others to criticise its policy either in a radical fashion or with the aim of promoting peace and negotiation. Hence, towards the end of the 1990s it seemed that a new formula would allow the harmonious combination of a rich Jewish life, with no hesitation about appearing as Jews in public, and of belonging to the Republic. Today it is this formula which is disintegrating.
The Crisis of the New Model
In the space of twenty years, the world of the Jews in France has become both more close-knit and weaker as a collective entity. Various gures from a recent study by Erik Cohen6 show that the world of the Jews has become more community oriented: 28,391 children attended Jew- ish schools in 2002 as compared with 15,907 at the end of the 1980s; today only 18% of Jewish heads of household state that they in no way participate in any collective life of the community as compared with 35% in 1988. The Jewish world is weakening because the Jews in France are an ageing and declining population: according to the same study, numbers have fallen from 535,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. There are also more people who envisage—and even actually accom- plish—their alyah (making alyah, or ‘going up’ is the departure of Jews to go and live in Israel): 6% say they are preparing to do so and, accord- ing to Israeli sources, twice as many people actually accomplished it in 2001 than in 2000. But it is true that there are no gures available for unsuccessful alyahs and for departures or returns from Israel to France. Finally, Jews in France are deeply attached to Israel: 86% say they are close or very close to Israel. Although frequently demonstrating their support for the State of Israel, even if it is to criticise its policy, and increasingly integrated in Jewish community organisations, the Jews in France are anxious.
6 Erik H. Cohen, Les Juifs de France, valeurs et identité, Fonds social juif uni é, Paris 2002. Cf. also the journal L’Arche, December 2002, which gives a very full account of the book and opens a discussion on its ndings.
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While they have always been sensitive to anything which suggests the rise of anti-Semitism, today they feel particularly threatened from all sides. They feel threatened by the most traditional anti-Semitism, that of the extreme right and the most sombre nationalism. They feel threatened by the ‘socialism of fools’ in the well-known words of Kronawetter, a Viennese socialist at the end of the 19th century for whom the Jews were a particularly malevolent incarnation of capitalism, boosted or weighed down, depending on the circumstances, by anti-Zionism. And, above all, they feel threatened by the acts of violence, aggressive atti- tudes, insults or threats which are said to come primarily from people of immigrant descent. The conviction that they are confronted with a rise in anti-Semitism has a certain number of effects on the Jews in France. The most wide- spread is a sort of re ex reaction whereby they return to the republican model. The aim is not to become ‘Israelites’—French citizens of Jewish confession—once again, but for the Republic to reconquer the territories which it would appear to have lost—we are referring here to the title of the book by Emmanuel Brenner, Les Territoires perdus de la République which we have already quoted and whose in uence with the Jews in France is considerable. Is the mission of the institutions of the Republic not to ensure the security and protection of all, and therefore also of the Jews? From this point of view, it is not about calling for some sort of assimilation, but instead for a return to discretion and minimal vis- ibility in their life as a community. Some observe that it is dangerous to expose oneself in public as Jewish, with a kippa or a Star of David, or by reading a publication with an explicitly Jewish title in a café or in the underground, and conclude that they must become less conspicuous once again. These people, and others, complain of the shortcomings of the state schools of the Republic and would like them to recover their erstwhile sup- posed vitality. In short, many are rediscovering the path of the founding model, inherited, as we said, from the Enlightenment, the Revolution, Napoleon I and the Third Republic. They propose an amended version but one which is indeed based on the fundamental principle of separa- tion between the public sphere, where according to them individuals enjoy freedom and equal rights (including, consequently, the right to be protected by the police and the legal system of the Republic) and the private sphere which, in comparison with the old formula, is much larger, more varied and more dynamic.
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Two Major Obstacles
However, this return to the clear separation of public and private, and therefore to the republican model is impossible. This is undoubtedly what makes the Jews in France so tense and so anxious. Such a return is prevented by two main trends. The rst is linked to their action as a community. This has an impact on the visibility of Jews in the public sphere whether they like it or not. It brings them resources, including political ones,7 particularly in places where there is a strong Jewish community which is organised and active at local level. It enables them to confront anti-Semitism better than when they expected the Republic and the usual representatives of democracy to do it all. It is also a major factor in mobilising and bringing pressure to bear in the public sphere. Acting as a community is even one of the sources of anti-Semitism, as we were able to observe in Sarcelles amongst young people of North African immigrant descent as well as Caribbean origin youths at the beginning of the 1990s: they said that they were, in a way, jealous of the strong sense of community spirit amongst the Jews in the town in view of their own incapacity to organise an equally strong community for themselves.8 The more anxious and threatened French Jews feel, the more they turn, in ever greater numbers, to Jewish organisations, the greater their impression that there is a crisis in the republican institutions and, in particular, that state schools are honouring the ne promises of the Republic less and less, and the more they subscribe to attitudes which depart from the republican norm stricto sensu. It is dif cult to see what could curb this tendency, the action of the Jews as a community in France being one of the expressions of a wider phenomenon—the gen- eral crisis of the Republic—while, at the same time, being a response to this crisis. There is a second reason which plays a role in making the return to a republican model, even an amended version of it, dif cult: the existence of the State of Israel and the deep attachment of Jews in France to it. For, Jews in France can no longer remain silent when the existence or even quite simply the direction of the policies of Israel
7 The annual dinner of the CRIF can illustrate this remark since it has become the occasion for its president to question the Prime Minister. 8 Nacira Guénif et al., edited by Michel Wieviorka, op. cit.
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are at stake; they cannot be silent in public debate if only because oth- ers intervene and in a way which may run counter to their interests. Nowadays, anything to do with Israel mobilises them—which obviously does not mean that they all support Ariel Sharon, far from it—and this encourages them to intervene, as Jews, in public debate. Now this also puts them in an awkward position, at least those who are endeavouring, somewhat confusedly, to return to the republican model. How can they hope to be considered as free individuals with equal rights without any collective visibility in the public sphere if, as soon as Israel is at stake, they see t to intervene on the subject, and often vehemently, in the self-same public sphere and as Jews? The republican model was invented before the creation of Israel in a France in which public and private life could be considered to be part of a single, national framework and in which belonging to a Diaspora had little impact on the inclusion of Jews in the state, the Republic and the nation. But today we cannot reduce the cultural and political existence of the Jews in France to the framework of the nation-state alone. Without casting the slightest doubt on their loyalty to their coun- try, they also want to be able to demonstrate and to say that they are concerned about what is happening in the Middle East. Hence, even if their collective life were to become extraordinarily inconspicuous and their religious life equally so, they could not refrain from enter- ing as Jews into public debate. In this situation, the ideologists of the republican model are left with no choice but to engage in rhetorical contortions—publicly, and as Jews, making their positions on Israel and its policy clear while at the same time, continuing, if need be, to participate in the dynamics of the community, however far removed from the traditional republican idea. Is it possible for Jews in France to extricate themselves from their current predicament and for the present crisis to be resolved? For this to happen, a number of conditions would have to be met. The most obvious has to do with the Middle East and the resolution of the con- ict between Israel and the Palestinians—it should be noted here, that on the whole, according to Erik Cohen’s survey, Jews in France are in favour of a negotiated peace settlement. Other conditions depend on the capacity of French political leaders to restore the institutions in charge of the republican idea, beginning with state schools. Finally, others depend on the Jews in France themselves, their ability to resist the present trends to radicalisation and extremes, including in the perception of problems and in the language used to describe them.
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From this point of view, the radicals and extremists who advocate that all Jews support the policies of Israel unconditionally, whatever they may be, are equating the Jews in the Diaspora with the Jews in Israel which is extremely dangerous because it provokes, in return, an anti- Semitic discourse which is based on the same equation.
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THE UNIQUENESS OF THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE
If we were to trust American opinion and the remarks of the rul- ers of the State of Israel, France sporadically appears a profoundly anti-Semitic country, where Jews are said to come up against serious physical threats and not only against hostile opinions and prejudices. Jews in France are themselves anxious, even if some, like Theo Klein,1 who was the president of the CRIF, advised them not to dramatise the situation. Anxious as the reader may be to avoid exaggeration and moral panic, he or she has now been presented with suf cient elements to admit that there are indeed questions to be asked. The eldwork discussed in the following chapters of this book should offer speci c and in-depth answers on the extent and gravity of the problem and, above all, its nature. But why is anti-Semitism much more prevalent in France than in other Western countries? France has various characteristics which make it an exceptional country, more propitious than others to the present-day revival of anti- Semitism. These speci cities are, in the rst instance, demographic. Although we are not able to give the precise gures, the Jewish popu- lation is by far the largest in the Diaspora after the United States: the gure currently advanced is 500,000 to 700,000 persons.2 France also has a very large population of immigrant descent from Arab and/or Muslim countries, beginning with those from the Maghreb. When it comes to categorising the members of this population by identity in terms as clear as it is to de ne a group of persons as Jewish, the endeavour is highly problematic, as Hervé Le Bras3 has shown, and the gures are vague—at the moment, the media advance the gure of
1 Théo Klein , Le Manifeste d’un juif libre, Paris, Liana Levi, 2002. 2 Émeric Deutsch, on the basis of a SOFRES survey, spoke of between 600,000 and 700,000 Jews in 1977; Doris Bensimon and Sergio Della Pergola, in La Population juive de France: socio-démographie et identité, Jewish Population Studies n° 17, 1986, calculate for the years 1972–1978, a population of 535,000, and Érik Cohen , op. cit., suggests a gure of 500,000 in 2002. 3 Hervé Le Bras , Le Démon des origines, La Tour d’Aigues, Éd. de l’Aube, 1998.
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